Robert Haralick's computerized project
CRES organizes Planetary Knowledge
By SUZANNE ATKINS Kansan Staff Writer
Sometimes it may be possible to map all the world's crop and mineral resources so they may be used more efficiently than ever before. Work being done at the Center for Research in Engineering Sciences (CRES) by Bob Haralick, assistant professor of electrical engineering, will help to systematize man's knowledge of our planet.
Haralick explained the usefulness of the several types of information which are currently being obtained from photographs taken from planes and by satellites orbiting the earth. Photographs taken by radar, due to its long wavelengths, reveal much about the texture of that which is being surveyed. For example, he said, the differing structures of corn in a corpatch and wheat in a wheatfield cause radar emanations to return differently to the camera from the fields.
Photos taken with ordinary visible-range light reveal the molecular structure of vegetation. Infrared photos reveal much about the heat structure of photographed objects or regions. For example, photos of the ocean uncover "warm" moving patches that are schools of fish, and reveal also knowledge of the roughness of the ocean surface and information about wave structure and wind speed.
The aim of the work being done by Haralick and his CRES crew is to develop a method whereby "the computer" — that substitute pseudo-human being—can analyze photographic data as well as its breathing counterpart. The ideal method would consti-
Jan. 9
1970 KANSAN 17
ture one of man's greatest breakthroughs—the capturing of man's creative, so-called "nonrational" nature in some sort of mathematically workable algorithm. As Haralick frankly admits, "No one's done it yet." In fact, he muses, creativity is usually defined in terms of the absence of a discoverable algorithm whereby the creative thing is performed.
The method whereby Haraiick and his colleagues are processing images automatically is by means of supplying "training" or initial data from images to the computer, along with a set of conditional probabilities and a mathematical "decision rule" whereby the probability of a given event, say that of a certain pattern of
gray tones being a photograph of a spruce forest, can be modified so that a better analysis will be performed on the next data set
One of the biggest problems that Haralick has run into is relating tones of gray from a photo to each other without the use of an absolute gray tone. This is vital, because the identity of objects photographed does not depend on their absolute tones. Any amateur photographer knows that two pictures of the same thing will differ sometimes in their coloring, as when the photo suffers from any number of variables in exposure and developing. But the tonal relationships between objects in a photo are consistent unless the
photograph has been grossly maltreated in some fashion.
The way this problem is gotten around involves "clustering," or separation of photographed areas into groups of similar tones. Then the groups can be separately processed on the basis of differences within themselves.
From structural changes within plants certain diseases of crops can be discerned from the processed images before they are
discoverable to the naked eye of the farmer.
If satellite photographs of the entire earth could be taken several times a year, he said, the amount and quality of growing foodstuffs could be determined. And if diseases or shortages threatened to produce famine, they could be discovered soon enough to initiate replacement growth of the crop in other parts of the world.
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