During the summer of 2003, engineers with the City of Fayetteville, Arkansas identified a need to rapidly and inexpensively generate an accurate, up-to-date map of impermeable surfaces within the city’s utility service area. Beginning that same spring, researchers at the RGIS MidSouth office had been investigating the feasibility of using DigitalGlobe Quickbird imagery for the mapping of urban surfaces. After a review of several high resolution satellite image products from RGIS Mid-South research team, the city decided to collaborate on an investigation of the use of high resolution, multi-spectral, satellite imagery for mapping the impermeable surfaces within their service area. The final data product was a five category dataset (map) suitable for storm water management modeling. The resulting accuracy assessment was based upon ground-truth points collected at times roughly corresponding to the image acquisition and the overall resulting accuracy for the delivered dataset was 84.21%. This research effort indicated that this methodology can be productively used for impermeable surface identification and efforts are now underway to transfer these results to several (private) engineering firms and other communities that are considering this same approach.
Mr. Culpepper is a GIS Research Specialist with eleven years of experience who serves as a research project manager for geospatial decision support and internet GIS projects. Currently, he is one of the primary outreach representatives for the Mid-South regional office of the National Consortium for Rural GeoSpatial Innovations (RGIS). Brian has taught a variety of GIS courses over the past eight years and enjoys the outdoors.
Dr. Jackson Cothren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas and a research scientist at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (www.cast.uark.edu), also at the University of Arkansas. He earned a BS in Mathematics from the United States Air Force Academy in 1989, an MS in Geodetic Science and Surveying from the Ohio State University in 2000, and a PhD in Geodetic Science and Surveying from the Ohio State University in 2004. He has over 14 years of experience in photogrammetry, image processing, computer vision, and geodesy with the US Air Force, the Ohio State University, and in private industry. * He is currently serving as team leader of an effort to design and implement a comprehensive geospatial-data infrastructure for seven Central America countries and part of Mexico. The geo-spatial data includes hundreds of Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 scenes from 1970 through 2003 and various contemporary MODIS products that will support carbon sequestration analysis throughout the Meso-American Biological Corridor. * He has worked extensively with Quickbird imagery as a source of imagery to update aging orthophotos and quickly generate impervious surface maps. Several grants have resulted in the purchase of over 700 square miles of 60 cm GSD satellite imagery. His work in this area has been extended through the National Consortium for Rural Geospatial Innovations (RGIS, www.ruralgis.org) to include developing techniques and training courses for using this type of imagery for low-cost ortho-photo updates on a county-wide basis. Through RGIS, he is leveraging CAST’s work in photogrammetric research to work closely with the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission to coordinate ortho-photo updates over 1800 square miles of Benton and Washington County in Arkansas. * He has worked with high school students across seven states to introduce fundamental and advanced GIS and remote sensing technical and planning skills as a member of the EAST Geospatial Support team at CAST (www.cast.uark.edu/cast/east and www.eastproject.org), develop curriculum for more than seven different two to five day short courses and visited more than 50 EAST labs in schools across California and Arkansas. * Both as an Air Force officer and as a civilian photogrammetric engineer working for the Air Force he was responsible for the direction and management of all photogrammetric and geodetic research at the National Air Intelligence Center. He has worked as professional consultant to private industry to develop digital photogrammetry software - including a self-calibrating bundle adjustments, non-metric camera calibration algorithms, and automatic target recognition algorithms.