NR is carrying out the Strategic Institute Programme (SIP) titled Next Generation of Image Analysis Methodology for Remote Sensing (NextGenRS) funded by The Research Council of Norway for the period 2006-2008. The vision of this SIP is to strengthen NR’s position within remote sensing disciplines where we are in the forefront of international research and development and, additionally, support NR to reach a leading role in new and emerging key disciplines that is foreseen to be important to Norway.

 

The SIP is strongly linked to national and international collaboration within current projects covering NR’s three main application areas 1) monitoring environment and climate, 2) natural resource mapping and monitoring and 3) detection and mapping of man-made objects. The selected areas of methodological research and development are I) generic methodology for multi-sensor, multi-scale, multi-temporal and hyperspectral data, II) retrieval of geophysical variables in the cryosphere, III) detection and classification of amorphous objects, IV) detection of man-made objects in very-high resolution imagery and V) high-accuracy pre-processing and lossless image compression. Areas I-IV are all strongly linked to current needs within the abovementioned application areas, while Area V supports the other methodological work.

 

In synergy with the application-oriented projects, NextGenRS contributes with key methodological frontier research results, while the other projects cover the more practical parts – including problem specification, collecting data sets, implementing large software systems, validating and demonstrating the results, and finally the clients evaluating the results.