2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	MSU Landscan CD Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan USA Year: 2002 Status: Laureate Category: Environment, Energy & Agriculture Nominating Company: Morgan Stanley
	A set of 143 CD-ROMS provides access to more than 80,000 aerial photographs, helping to guide on-land action decisions by several hundred diverse organizations.
	The MSU LandScan CD-ROMs contain the first comprehensive statewide collection of digital color aerial photographs of land areas in the State of Michigan. The Michigan State University (MSU) Center for Remote Sensing has converted statewide 35mm aerial photography, acquired annually for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to digital images. The image files are available on CD-ROM discs organized by county. The LandScan Viewer, a custom-written computer program, provides quick and easy access to display, analyze, modify, and print these aerial images. Each summer since the early 1980’s, contractors to the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) take aerial photographs of the agricultural areas in the United States. In Michigan, color slides are taken with a 35mm camera from light aircraft flying at about 2,500 meters (8,000 feet). Each slide contains a photograph of a Public Land Survey Section of land about 400 hectares (1.5-square miles) in extent. The flights occur mainly in the summer or fall season. The slides are used to verify compliance with various agricultural programs administered by the FSA; such as land areas set a side from farming. Over the past 20 years, other organizations have found these aerial slides useful for their business applications. In 1992, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) partnered with the Farm Service Agency to acquire 35mm aerial slides of most areas in Michigan, including the non-agricultural lands of the state. Aerial survey contractors took over 57,000 color slides covering about 98% of Michigan. NRCS used the air photos to help update their National Resources Inventory information. Under NRCS funding, the MSU Center for Remote Sensing conducted several research projects that investigated developing a process to scan the slides to create digital images that could be used for NRCS applications. The research project finds eventually lead to a 1995 project agreement between FSA, NRCS, and Michigan State University to scan and index the 57,000 color slides and assemble them onto a set of CD-ROM discs that would be accessible by a “to-be-developed” image viewer. The MSU Libraries, Computing and Technology office provided most of the initial funding to cover the scanning costs. The Michigan State Office of the Farm Service Agency directed 83 County Offices to deliver their 1992 35mm slides to the State Office (each county office maintains the collection for its own county). After the slide collections had arrived at the state office, they were loaned to Michigan State University. Copies were made of the index maps and other finding aides that accompanied the slides. The slides were then submitted, about a quarter of the sets at a time, to a contractor for scanning. Quality control procedures were implemented to check and insure that the images were appropriately referenced to the correct geographic location. Through the NRCS research projects we determined that the quickest, most economical, and highest quality image product could be produced by commercially scanning the slides into Kodak Photo CD digital images. The original 35mm slides were scanned on a Kodak Photo CD Workstation and stored in a file format called an Image Pack. Each file stores one image at five different scan resolutions. It took almost a year to obtain and scan the original slides for each of the 83 counties in Michigan. Over 600 Photo CDs were created containing up to 100 images sets per disc. Image resolution tests were conducted to determine the usefulness of the different resolution images in the Photo CD Image set for identifying common natural and human-made features that occur in Michigan’s landscape. A higher scan resolution produces a higher quality image, but creates a larger size file. It was determined that the second highest resolution images provided the best quality image at a file size that would allow all of the digital aerial photos for most counties in Michigan to fit on one CD-ROM disc. These images can depict features on the ground that are at least 3 meters (10 feet) in size. An in-house computer program was developed to extract the second highest resolution image from each Image Pack file on the 613 Photo CDs. The extraction program reads the appropriate database table that was constructed for each county in Michigan. The county databases contain information about each Photo CD file, including its name, CD volume number, photo orientation, acquisition date, and the location of the image scene within the U.S. Public Land Survey System of Michigan (i.e., the Town, Range, and Section number). The geographic location and orientation of each aerial photo was determined by viewing the 57,000 slides on a light table. When an image resolution layer is extracted from the Photo CD file set, its orientation is read from the county table and if it is rotated or flipped with respect to the normal south-to-north orientation of a flight line, the image is corrected on-the-fly for any deviations from the normal. The image is compressed (typically by a factor of 7 to 1) before it is written to the LandScan image format. A small thumbnail sized overview image is also included in the new file. The photos were organized by county and then written to 92 CD-ROMs. Two CDs were required to hold all of images for nine of the 83 counties in the Michigan. The extraction/data compression software reduced the total number of CDs needed to store the scanned photos from 613 Photo CDs to 92 LandScan CDs. Prototype viewer software was developed the first year and tested in-house. The first complete set of CD-ROMs was delivered to NRCS in October 1996. The LandScan product and the viewer software were beta-tested and revised over the next year. The MSU LandScan CD product was officially released in October 1997. Each LandScan CD includes hundreds of digital images of a county in Michigan and the LandScan Viewer software. The viewer makes it easy to locate and retrieve the image for a desired geographic location. Users can display, bookmark, zoom in, enhance image quality, and print aerial images from the LandScan CD collection. Navigation buttons allow the user to immediately display the adjacent aerial photograph to the north, south, east, or west of the current image. The user can also export images to more than a dozen common image file formats for use in other software applications. The images can also be printed in black-and-white or in true color mode. The initial LandScan CD-ROM collection (92 CDs) contains a digital archive of the 1991/92 35mm aerial photography of Michigan. Additional LandScan CDs containing digital aerial images for earlier or more recent dates of photography have been released for selected counties. About 20 new LandScan CD-ROMs are released each year. As of November 2001, 143 CD-ROMs have been produced that provide access to more than 80,000 color 35mm aerial photographs of land sections in all 83 counties of Michigan. More than 1,000 copies of LandScan CDs have been purchased by several hundred organizations for use in their business applications. County and local governmental users include drain commissions, emergency management agencies, equalization/tax mapping departments, information services, road commissions, planning departments, cities and townships. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has purchased the entire collection for distribution to all district and county health departments in the state for use in their source water assessment and wellhead protection programs. County conservation districts, watershed councils, and land conservancy organizations have also obtained copies. At the state level, LandScan CD users include staff in the departments of Environmental Quality (Drinking Water & Radiological Protection, Environmental Response and Geological Survey), Natural Resources (Forestry and Wildlife), Management and Budget (Michigan Information Center), Housing and Development, and Transportation. About 70 private firms and consultants are using the LandScan CD product for a broad range of applications. Major private sector users include sawmills and timber companies, the petroleum industry, environmental engineering firms, crop production services and fertilizer companies, electrical utilities, land surveyors, the building and construction industry, and real estate agencies. Other private sector uses include advertising, marketing, land planning, appraisal, and landscape visualization. Colleges and universities in Michigan have acquired selected CD-ROMS for their research areas of interest. The University of Michigan Map Library purchased the entire statewide collection for faculty and student access at their facility. As an alternative to using individual county-based LandScan CDs, the MSU Center for Remote Sensing and GIS recently placed the entire LandScan aerial photo collection on an image file server. With image compression, the current collection requires about 40 GB of disk storage compared to over 280 GB if the images were not compressed. New viewer software installed at remote locations across campus (including the MSU Map Library) provides access to any aerial photo in the statewide collection. All of the 1992 LandScan images on the file server have been converted and compressed (30-to-1) to create a lower resolution version of each LandScan image. A custom-written web browser provides Internet access to view these thumbnail images. A prospective LandScan CD buyer can view the browser images to determine the availability and quality of the aerial photos prior to ordering the CD product.
	The MSU LandScan CD-ROMs contain the first comprehensive statewide collection of digital color aerial photographs of land areas in the State of Michigan. Over 80,000 35mm aerial photographs acquired for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been converted to digital images. The image files are available on county-based CD-ROM discs that include custom-written software for viewing the aerial images. Until the release of the LandScan CD product, the only way to access the USDA Farm Service Agency aerial photos was to visit or contact one or more of the 83 county FSA offices in Michigan. You would have to request a manual search of the slides (probably stored in a 3-ring binder) to locate the slide(s) of interest to you. If you wanted a copy of the original color slide(s), they would be sent to a photo-processing lab for duplication. You could pick them up at some later date. All of the 35mm color slides for a Michigan county (typically about 600 photos) are now available on one convenient CD-ROM disc. The included LandScan Viewer provides quick and easy access to display, analyze, modify, and print any of these aerial photographs. The LandScan digital images provide a better format for business applications being easier to view than copies of the original slides. Zoom tools and a unique magnifying glass cursor allow the user to quickly enlarge and analyze sub areas of the image. Digital and printed hardcopies can be reproduced right at the user’s desktop. The compressed images on the CD-ROM can be converted to more than a dozen common image file formats (e.g., Windows bitmaps, TIFF or JPEG images). This allows the user to transfer the aerial imagery to other software applications. Some LandScan CD users merge selected aerial photographs into reports or other documents that are prepared using a word processing program. The quality of the original 35mm color slides is highly variable from very good to poor (e.g., over- or under-exposed images). Now, through image controls in the LandScan Viewer the user can correct the appearance of the image for their intended purpose. Image brightness, hue, saturation can be adjusted. Corrections can be made to correct images that are under exposed or over exposed, to sharpen blurry images or to enhance the edges in the image. Other major benefits of the LandScan CD project are: · Image Preservation - A more permanent archive of statewide aerial photos has been created that is useful for a variety of historical studies. · Technology Transfer - Many first time users of aerial photography are using the LandScan CD product. It has created greater awareness and wider dissemination of this type of aerial photography. · Technology Utilization - The digital aerial photos are being used in many diverse business applications from agricultural land services to consumer energy services, from timber management to public health and from land conservation to construction and real estate activities. Other organizations that have benefited from this product are drain commissions, emergency management agencies, equalization/tax-mapping departments, road commissions, planning departments, watershed councils, city and township governments.
	Without recent advances in information technology, this project would not have been possible. Scanning and image compression technology have allowed us to capture and display a vast amount of aerial photographic information in a compact package right at the desktops of land management agencies throughout Michigan. More than 80,000 color aerial photos have been reproduced on a mere 143 CD-ROMs. Users can almost instantaneously retrieve aerial photos of any desired location in the State of Michigan. The initial 57,000 color slides were scanned on a commercial grade Kodak Photo CD Workstation. Each color slide was scanned at five different resolutions from 128x192 pixels to 2048x3072 pixels in size into a merged Photo CD 5-Image Pack file. The Kodak scanning algorithms and color management software ensure consistent, high-quality images. The images were compressed to reduce the initial large file (about 18 megabytes) to about 6 megabytes. The images are stored at multiple levels of resolution in layers within an Image Pack file. All of the techniques used in creating a Photo CD image have been carefully analyzed to produce visually loss-less results. The highest resolution image captures the maximum image resolution of 35mm film. Up to 100 Photo CD image files were written to about 613 CD-ROM discs. The highest resolution image in a Photo CD 5-Image Pack file captures and preserves the content of the original color slides. A higher scan resolution produces a higher quality image, but creates a larger file. Since each Photo CD file holds 5 different resolution images of the same aerial photo, it allowed us to evaluate which of the 5 renditions provided the best image quality/file size tradeoff for mass distribution on CD-ROMs. Image resolution tests were conducted to determine the usefulness of different resolution images for identifying common natural and human-made features that occur in Michigan’s landscape. A variety of features were interpreted including roads, urban land uses, forestlands, wetlands, agricultural areas, shorelines, and water features (lakes, ponds, rivers, and drains). The second highest resolution image (1024x1536 pixels) was used to create the LandScan CD product. These images resolve features on the ground that are at least 3 meters (10 feet) in size. Over the past 5 years with technology advances in more affordable, high-resolution color slide scanners, we have switched from having Kodak Photo CD images created to scanning the slides in-house on a desktop color slide scanner which can auto feed 50 color slides. Conducting the scanning process in-house has allowed us to implement better quality assurance and quality control procedures. As a result of more recent advances in desktop flat bed scanners, we have extended our scanning activities to other types of aerial photography, principally conventional 9x9 inch black-and-white prints. Michigan State University maintains an Aerial Imagery Archive containing paper prints of over 300,000 aerial photographs of Michigan dating from the 1930’s. Multiple years of photography are available for every county in the state. We have begun to scan, index, and assemble aerial photos from the archive in a manner similar to and consistent with the LandScan CD product. The geographic referencing index is different and the scanned images are larger in size than the LandScan photos, but the newest custom-built viewer software can access and display these images as well as the LandScan photos. Desktop database management software allowed us to store and retrieve processing and geographic location information for each of the 57,000 Photo CD image files. A separate database table was created for the 83 counties in Michigan. In-house image conversion software used the reference data in the county tables to properly convert, rotate, compress and name the LandScan image files. The LandScan product would not have been created without the availability of an Imaging Software Development Toolkit (ActiveX control) for Visual Basic. This one software component allows us to write both the in-house image conversion program and the LandScan Viewer software. The major capabilities of the imaging component are converting image files to a different format, rotating images, creating thumbnail overview images, compressing image data, color controls, zoom and magnifying tools, and print functions. Using imaging technology, the viewer can quickly access and display the digital images and provide simple to sophisticated photo processing functions in one desktop product. Other key information technologies that made this project possible were multiple CD changers, large capacity (100 gigabyte) network file servers, and desktop CD burners (writers). The in-house conversion software was written to read up to a maximum of six CDs held in a multiple CD changer/reader. About 600 image files could be converted in a single, unattended overnight processing run. The large capacity disk drives were used to store and organize tens of thousands of large image files prior to writing them to CD discs. The CD writing units created the final CD-ROM products. The large disk capacity (650 megabytes) of CDs accommodated the storage of all of the compressed aerial images for most counties on one disc.
	As far as we know the LandScan product is the first digital collection of Farm Service Agency 35mm color aerial photography in the nation. Similar hardcopy aerial photography continues to be acquired in other states and could be captured to form a digital imagery archive like the one created and being updated for the State of Michigan. The LandScan collection is an exceptional product in its volume, in the quality of the aerial photographs, and in the comprehensiveness of its availability for all land areas in Michigan. As of November 2001, 143 CD-ROMs have been produced that provides access to more than 80,000 color 35mm aerial photographs of land sections in all 83 counties of Michigan. The LandScan imagery collection is also unique because it consists of mainly true color aerial photographs. The availability of true color aerial photography of Michigan is very limited. True color aerial photography (instead of Color Infrared or Black-and-White photos) is a preferred medium for most beginning users because it depicts the landscape in a natural perspective (just as the human eye normally perceives it). Before the release of the LandScan product, the original 35mm color slides had to be accessed by staff of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. When the LandScan project was started in mid-1990, the concept of bundling a “to-be-built” custom image viewer with digital aerial photos on a set of CD-ROMs for an entire state was new and novel. In fact, at that time we know the information technology components (i.e., scanning, data compression, imaging software toolkits, and CD-ROMs) were available to create such a product, but we didn’t know how to actually implement them for packaging and delivery of 57,000 statewide photographs on CD-ROM. The U.S. Public Land Survey System, used in this product, provides a unique indexing scheme that allows the un-rectified photos to be geographically referenced and quickly retrieved by the viewer software. Land areas in Michigan are subdivided into rectangular grids (sections) of land roughly one square mile in extent. The LandScan image files are named by their geographic location within this grid (referenced by a Town, Range, and Section number). Viewer navigation buttons allow the user to immediately display the adjacent aerial photograph to the north, south, east, or west of the current image (i.e., land section within the grid).
	The LandScan product has exceeded its expected goals. In has more than satisfied the original internal needs of Michigan State University and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Michigan. At the time the product was released in November 1997, we believed there would be a demand for the product by other organizations, particularly staff in departments of state government and other educational institutions. The actual demand for this product has far surpassed on initial expectations. It has created greater awareness and wider dissemination of this type of aerial photography. More than 1,000 copies of the MSU LandScan CDs have been purchased by several hundred organizations for use in their business applications. The product has received excellent responses and high praise from many users. The success of this product is especially rewarding because many of the purchasers are first time users of aerial photography. County and local governmental users include drain commissions, emergency management agencies, equalization/tax mapping departments, information services, road commissions, planning departments, cities and townships. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has purchased the entire collection for distribution to all district and county health departments in the state for use in their source water assessment and wellhead protection programs. County conservation districts, watershed councils, and land conservancy organizations have also obtained copies. At the state level, LandScan CD users include staff in the departments of Environmental Quality (Drinking Water & Radiological Protection, Environmental Response and Geological Survey), Natural Resources (Forestry and Wildlife), Management and Budget (Michigan Information Center), Housing and Development, and Transportation. About 70 private firms and consultants are using the LandScan CD product for a broad range of applications. Major private sector users include sawmills and timber companies, the petroleum industry, environmental engineering firms, crop production services and fertilizer companies, electrical utilities, land surveyors, the building and construction industry, and real estate agencies. Other private sector uses include advertising, marketing, land planning, appraisal, and landscape visualization. Colleges and universities in Michigan have acquired selected CD-ROMS for their research areas of interest. The University of Michigan Map Library purchased the entire statewide collection for faculty and student access at their facility. The original viewing software has been used for more than 4 years without a bug report or a maintenance release being issued. The viewer is very stable because there was a very long (2 year) beta testing phase. There was not an urgent rush to get the image viewer written and tested because the software development phase of the project had to wait for the completion of the long image assembly phase. The product development phase took over 3 years to complete due to the sheer volume of the media (initially over 57,000 slides) that had to be organized, indexed, and scanned, compressed, and assembled onto county-based CD-ROMs. There continues to be a demand for more recent aerial photos. About 20 new LandScan CD-ROMs are released each year. As of November 2001, 143 CD-ROMs have been produced that provides access to more than 80,000 color 35mm aerial photographs of land sections in all 83 counties of Michigan. Individuals in other states have inquired about the availability of LandScan CD images for areas in their state. They were disappointed when they found out that there is no similar product for their region.
	Producing the LandScan CD product was a challenging experience requiring arranging with the Farm Service Agency to obtain the original 57,000 35mm color slides acquired over the 83 counties of Michigan. The Michigan State Office of the Farm Service Agency directed each of their County Offices to deliver their 1992 35mm slides to the State Office (each county office maintains the collection for its own county). Once all the collections had arrived at the state office, they were loaned to Michigan State University. Copies were made of the index maps or other finding aides that accompanied the slides. Although many slide sets (counties) were well indexed and labeled, many were not. Some counties had chosen to store their slides in their original boxes by flight line instead of by township. A number of slides were miss labeled, especially whenever a Civil Township was composed of more than one Congressional or survey township. It was a major task to match each slide with its appropriate section and to insure that each section was covered by a slide. This was a particularly difficult task in the northern parts of the state in areas with few roads or other landmarks to guide the indexing. A final check was made of each county CD-ROM to insure that the images were appropriately matched with their correct geographic location (land survey section). The indexing, labeling, and quality assurance phase of the project took MSU staff and students more than a year to accomplish. The image conversion process required the creation of in-house software to extract a single resolution layer (1024x768 pixels) from the Kodak Photo CD 5-Image Pack files and then compress the images to a new file format. The challenge was to locate, evaluate and integrate a commercially available imaging software development toolkit for Visual Basic. The conversion software would have to be written to automatically extract, rotate, compress, and rename of each image file based on information contained in county database table. Time was also a major difficulty that we tried to overcome in this project. Aerial imagery is most useful to the broadest number of users shortly after it is acquired. More recent aerial photography is needed as soon as the landscape substantially changes. Additional student labor was assigned to work on the project in an effort to quicken its release. The conversion software was subsequently revised to read multiple Photo CDs held in a six-disc changer/reader in unattended overnight processing runs. Another area of difficulty was the challenge to fit all the aerial photographs for a given county onto one CD-ROM disc. Most of the images in the LandScan collection are at a 7 to 1 data compressed ratio with no loss in image quality. The images for a couple counties had to be compressed beyond the 7:1 ratio in order to fit them on one CD. Even after file compression, the image files for nine counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan would not fit on a standard 650mb CD-ROM disc. This situation posed several challenges. How should the images be geographically divided between multiple discs? The viewer software code had to be revised to detect and properly handle a split image collection for some counties. A major unexpected problem was the unreliability of the first releases of 2x CD burners (writers) to create CDs from data stored on a network file server. Quite often the server/network/writer interface was not fast enough to create a usable disc. Many CD-ROM discs were rendered unusable and the CD-ROM creation process had to be restarted. The most reliable process was to create a virtual CD-ROM image on the hard disk of the file server and then transfer virtual CD-ROM image to the hard drive of the computer containing the CD writer. A major limitation of the LandScan Viewer is that the user must know the geographic location for the photo of interest referenced to the U.S. Public Land Survey System (i.e., the Town-Range-Section notation number). The user must have prior knowledge of this referencing system or use a county atlas or plat book to identify the correct geographic reference numbers. A logical solution to the image-referencing problem is to create a map viewer product that can display digital reference maps that are like a hardcopy county atlas. The user could then point to a location on the digital map and press a mouse button to retrieve and display the LandScan aerial photo(s) for this area. The digital map data and the technology to create such a product was not available when the LandScan product was developed. Even if it could have been developed, it was beyond the scope of the LandScan project. We did eventually solve this image-referencing problem by creating a map viewer, but it has taken four years to develop the new product called the Michigan MapImage Viewer. This county-based CD-ROM product contains recently constructed digital map data for the state of Michigan. The MapImage Viewer is a Geographic Information System (GIS) technology product that was created to search and view mapped features and their associated attribute information. Besides serving independent GIS user needs, the viewing software was constructed to also provide enhanced access to LandScan CD images. New software tools were added for viewing, manipulating, and annotating LandScan photos and others types of digital aerial photography.