Search

JICA and JAXA have operated a tropical forest early warning system (JJ-FAST) since 2016 and ALOS-2 L-band SAR system (PALSAR-2/ScanSAR) is used for forest monitoring and deforestation detection. There are many factors to cause commission errors in SAR image and ground moisture is one of them. To reduce such commission errors, seasonal change analysis is effective. In this study, a time-series analysis method using Savitzky-Golay (SG) filtering was developed. The method of speckle noise filtering by frost and 2-step thresholding and time-series analysis using SG was good method. The accuracy of forest change detection was improved from 19% of the threshold method to 80%.

It is difficult to walk on the loose ground for the leg typed rovers. Our study group considered that traction of the leg typed rovers is passive earth pressure given to the leg. Passive earth pressure given to the leg is increased by changes of the ground when giving vibration. Therefore, increasing sinkage which is increased when giving vibration to the ground is important to increase passive earth pressure. However, the relationship between the kind of vibration and the sinkage which is increased when giving vibration to the ground is not still understood. In this study, the effects which are given by vibration to the ground are confirmed from the experiment using a few kinds of vibration. In this experiment, the rod which is same as leg types is penetrated in the ground using the experimental machine. Moreover, resistance force from the ground is measured. In experimental results, It was confirmed that the more vibratory force is high, the more resistance from the ground is small.

In order to reduce speckle noise effects in forest cover change analysis, two types of SAR processing approach have been proposed so far. One is a type of object-based segmentation approaches and another is pixel-based processing approaches using speckle noise filtering such as Lee and Frost filter. This paper proposes a methodology of the pixel-based algorithm for forest change detection using PALSAR-2 ScanSAR data. Frost filter is applied to reduce speckle noise and normalization filter is implemented to reduce ground moisture effects. In case of Peru and Paraguay, the user’s accuracy of developed algorithm was almost same as those of JJ-FAST version-2 while the producer’s accuracy was 3 times better than JJ-FAST latest version (version-2).

JJ-FAST is an operational forest early warning system using PALSAR-2/ScanSAR mode data. Its deforestation detection algorithm has been updated since 2016 and the current is version 1 (as of January, 2018) and the algorithm version 2 is preparing to implement in March 2018. Overall user's accuracy of version-1 products was estimated from several field experiments, and achieved as 83.3%. There are omission errors in the version 1 products because of its simple HV change detection approach.

Clothes are very important for daily life. We always wash, dry, and fold them for maintenance of clothes. Washing and drying were already automated. However, folding isn't automated. Automation of folding clothes is expected for not only industry, but also home use. Unfortunately, folding system for home use is not perfect yet. A folding system is implement with normal table and small mobile robots which developed in this study. There are clothes and the camera on the table, because it can be provided only narrow space for this system while use in homes. In this paper, we proposed folding motion with edge of table and automated the folding system considering limit of work space.

Due to the spread of the Internet and improvement of the audio compression technology, we need technologies to handle a large number of audio files. Separating singing voice from music is one of them and it is used in many applications, such as lyric retrieval and singer recognition. Recently, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) has been proposed, which makes use of repetition of a phrase in an accompaniment. We assume that there are some points to be improved in RPCA. In this paper, we propose a developed method based on the RPCA algorithm. First, we propose the extended RPCA algorithm that makes use of the two features of the spectrogram. Second, we apply simple post-processing to remove noise effectively. Lastly, we experiment our algorithm using the MIR-1K dataset and confirm that the proposed algorithm shows better separation performance than the conventional RPCA method.

We studied the contact current after Vc=Um of electric contacts during ‘initial arc’. Using the transient current switch circuit (diodes, resistor and capacitor parallel to the contacts), the melting phenomena of cross-rod electrodes of 0.5mm in diameter were separately observed from arc discharge. Measurement of electric characteristics and observation of the contact area features by laser microscope were able to confirm the existence of conduction current due to the remaining metal contact. This would means that conductive currents flow just after Vc=Um, arcing currents join them one by one, and only the arcing current flows at the last.

In this paper, risk communication as it relates to the issue of personal information leakage is discussed with the help of participants using the Multiplex Risk Communicator support system. We propose an information acquisition method that is divided into three phases corresponding to cognition models by the clarity of the information acquisition objective. The key characteristic of this method is the quick transition among three phases that effectively promotes learning in novice participants. An experiment verifies the effects of the proposed method.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency creates the “JAXA High Resolution Land-Use and Land-Cover Map (JHR LULC Map)” in Japan. The data was acquired by the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2), onboard the Advanced Land Observation Satellite. Ortho-rectification, atmospheric and slope correction were applied to the AVNIR-2 data. The number of the input data for the classification is 1,876 scenes which were acquired from April 28, 2006 to April 15, 2011. The classification categories are 1) water, 2) urban, 3) paddy, 4) crop, 5) grass, 6) deciduous forest, 7) evergreen forest, 8) bare land, and 9) snow and ice. Pixel spacing of the JHR LULC Map is 0.000278° and 0.000333° for the latitude and longitude, respectively. The temporal classification accuracy was found to be 89.3%, which was calculated using the validated accuracy of the classification multiplied by the surface ratio in each category by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

The special and temporal analysis is a primitive approach in the remote sensing field. The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS, nicknamed `Daichi') has been operated very well from 2006 to 2011, and mainly observed global land region with fine resolutions by three sensors i.e. an L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar called PALSAR and two optical instruments called PRISM and AVNIR-2. They have been captured actual Earth's surface in to this era. As the ALOS follow-on mission, ALOS-2 is succeeded to the Radar mission of ALOS and carried on the state-of-the-art L-band SAR called PALSAR-2, and will be launched in JFY2013. On another front, the ALOS follow-on optical mission has not been approved by the government. This study describes to generate the simulated images and their evaluations for the next land observation satellite. In JAXA, the optical imager that has capabilities of a finer resolution, wide observation swath width, and stereo function are expected as the PRISM follow-on instrument tentatively called PRISM-2. To identify hardware specifications of PRISM-2 as well as utilization capability of acquired data, simulated images were generated with various parameters using the airborne line scanner, and the image quality, interpretation capacity, and the height estimation accuracy by stereo pair images were evaluated.