Kuei-Tsung (Philips) Shih

PhD Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact Information

Office: LAR 317

Tel: 1-352-392-9046

Email: ktshih@ufl.edu and shih@chrec.org

Spring 2008 Schedule

Research Activities

Airborne Laser Swath Mapping (ALSM) has been widely used in remotely sensing topography. The acquired ALSM data (unevenly spaced "point cloud") must be gridded or interpolated to reconstruct a dense Digital Elevation Model (DEM). These DEMs usually exhibit quasi-periodic biases in elevation of around 20 cm in magnitude. This corduroy artifact is perceptible to human eyes, especially on DEMs over low-relief areas or smooth surfaces. My research currently focuses on the development of an end-to-end ALSM simulator that helps characterize and mitigate the artifact.

Figure 1. (Left) Simulated data:ALSM sampling on simulated flat terrain with scan angle reading time equal to 20 times laser pulse time, showing corduroy patterns along swath direction (Right) Actual data: acquired using UF ALSM laser over a low-relief area near Pahrump Valley, NV, showing corduroy patterns on flat areas

Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC), established in January 2007, is a new national NSF center for fundamental research in reconfigurable computing (RC). I am a student member of CHREC and particularly involved with the F3 group that focuses on application studies and high level languages. The goal of my work is to develop methodologies for fast onboard lidar processing via High-Performance Embedded RC devices. The follow diagram illustrates the idea of multi-rate batch processing for an onboard lidar processor implemented via FPGA.

Figure 2. Scan angle, aircraft attitude, and aircraft GPS position are updated at different rates so the data are buffered until the next slowest-updated parameter is ready.

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