Date of Award

3-1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Engineering Physics

First Advisor

Michael C. Roggemann, PhD

Abstract

The Open Skies Treaty provides guidelines allowing participants to fly in air space over other participants' countries to monitor strategic military placement and development. The treaty restricts the ground size of the smallest detail recorded by these aerial imaging systems to any size larger than 30 cm. This restriction is enforced by placing a lower limit on the altitude at which a participating aircraft can fly and it is computed as the value of Hmin. Current techniques rely on human photographic interpreters to select the value of Hmin for every calibration pass and is very resource intensive. The Open Skies participants are investigating machine based techniques to supplement the traditional human role in an effort to increase the objectiveness of the measurement. This thesis presents a software tool called, ADiM, a man-in-the-loop, algorithm which manipulates image statistics to identify the orientation and width of individual target bar groups from digitized images of aerial photographs of Open Skies Treaty calibration triple bar target. ADiM Hmin results achieved an 88.6 percent correlation with the Open Skies Media Processing Facility's Hmin computations.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GOR-ENP-97M-01

DTIC Accession Number

ADA323187

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