Military spy technology could be boon to local scientists

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

That's the lesson being learned by a group of private and government biologists and the United States military.

The military has some incredibly sophisticated devices it uses to find tanks, buildings and other targets on the ground from high-flying aircraft.

Enemy forces know that, and they take advantage of terrain and vegetation to hide munitions and equipment.

When military technicians look at the high-tech, computer-generated images, the rocks and vegetation and water look like "clutter" and obscure their search.

But the soils and plants and streams are what most interest scientists like Bob Crabtree.

"Their clutter is our target," Crabtree said last week.

He is chief scientist of HyPerspectives, a Bozeman-based company working with federal research labs to fine-tune the reading of images snatched from above.

"Vegetation gives them heartburn. But we like it. That's our expertise," he said.

Montana State University's Tech Link, funded in part by the Department of Defense, has helped connect HyPerspectives and some military labs.

The military is supplying airplanes that have been flying over the northern Yellowstone region in July, carrying devices that incorporate both radar and hyperspectral imaging, which translate an image of an object such as a tree into a wide variety of colors. The devices create something called a "waterfall" that, on a computer screen, looks like a video aerial photo.

Picking all the valuable information out of those images is complicated and involves a lot a "ground truthing." That means comparing a specific item on the ground -- say a whitebark pine tree -- to the combination of colors that appears in the image of that object.

But once that combination is known, you can order the computer to seek matching images and highlight them. For instance, it could highlight on a map all the whitebark pines, something a team of biologists might need years to do.

In a meeting at TechLink, Crabtree demonstrated for local scientists how the technology works.

His crew had spread a dozen 8-meter by 8-meter camouflage tarps in a meadow north of Cooke City, tarps that were invisible in an ordinary aerial photograph, but stood out from the background when a few strokes of the keyboard overlaid the radar and hyperspectral data.

The technology gains military value because the data arrives in real time, showing commanders how the opposition is moving, where it is hiding and what type of terrain can be expected.

The images can show foliage, soil moisture, water depth and steepness of terrain.

"It's a real-time view of everything that's happening on the battlefield," said Neil Holt, program manager Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory, one of the partners in the research.

The technology also offers lots of benefits for land managers.

Predicting fire behavior becomes easier. So does mapping wildlife habitat, locating pollution or mineral deposits or finding the mating habitat of rare frogs.

"It's a marriage made in heaven," Crabtree said. "Of their needs and our needs."

Andrew Marcus, a researcher at the University of Oregon, said it took five years of wandering the stream bottoms in Yellowstone's northern range to find a pond where some rare frogs and toads were mating.

But after he compared that location to the hyperspectral image, he told the computer to find similar spots on its map. It's a process similar to using an Internet search engine.

"I spent one night at the computer and found five sites," Marcus said.

The applications of the technology have yet to be fully explored, Crabtree said.

"This is just the beginning," he said.

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