Established in 2004 by Dr. Kenneth Clint Slatton, the ASPL research laboratory investigates and reports novel approaches to adaptive signal processing through the application of system theory, pattern recognition, and modeling of sensors and target phenomenology for remote sensing of Earth System processes. The lab is located in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

ASPL News

In Memory of Dr. K. Clint Slatton Kenneth Clinton "Clint" Slatton was born in Huntsville, Alabama on October 13, 1970. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2001. He moved to Gainesville, Florida, in 2003, joining the faculty in the University of Florida (UF) Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Civil and Coastal Engineering. Clint became a Co-PI for the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), and developed classes in airborne laser mapping and related remote sensing techniques that attracted large numbers of students and contributed to technological advances that brought long-standing and new scientific questions within the reach of researchers at leading academic institutions and governmental agencies across the nation. Clint's research was interdisciplinary, covering the areas of remote sensing, multi-scale estimation, data fusion, statistical signal processing, lidar and radar applications. He was particularly interested in developing methods to extract the maximum information from remote sensing observations by combining observations from different technologies to exploit the complementary information derived from each. He led a vibrant research program of international renown and was an outstanding instructor and mentor who will be missed by his professional colleagues and students. Clint Slatton was a widely respected member of the UF faculty, and in 2009, just months after his diagnosis of metastatic melanoma, he received tenure, becoming an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. Even at the young age of 39, Clint had already established himself as an exceptionally talented researcher—receiving, in 2007, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award was presented to Clint and only a few other researchers from across the country, in a White House ceremony. And Clint also had received several research grants and contracts from the NSF, NASA, U.S. Army, and Office of Naval Research. Just days before Clint’s death he and his colleagues at UF received approval from NSF of a grant to develop a new green laser sensor-head for the airborne laser mapping system used by NCALM to collect observations for NSF PIs. Even though he was suffering badly from his illness, Clint was excited by the prospects of the advances in science that he thought were sure to come from mapping areas of the earth’s surface covered by shallow water (including streams, lakes, and coastal areas) that will be made possible by the new sensor. For relaxation Clint enjoyed astronomy, playing guitar, watching college football, and visiting the Slatton family's Tennessee farm. But as much as he enjoyed his work and personal pastimes, Clint’s greatest source of happiness was the time he spent with his wife Jennifer and their five children—-William, age 9, Emma, age 6, Ryan, age 4, Jack, age 2, and Thomas, age 6 months. Clint Slatton passed away at home in Gainesville, Florida, surrounded by his family, on March 30, 2010, after a valiant 13-month battle with cancer.

ASPL student passes PhD oral defense ASPL student Tristan Cossio presented his dissertation entitled "Prediction of Topographic and Bathymetric Measurement Performance of Airborne Low-SNR Lidar Systems" to his PhD committees on June 8, 2009. He successfully defended, thus achieving doctoral status.

ASPL student passes PhD oral prospectus defense ASPL student Kristofer Shrestha presented his dissertation proposal to his PhD committee on May 29, 2009. He successfully defended, thus achieving status as a PhD candidate.

ASPL student passes PhD oral defense ASPL student Karthik Nagarajan presented his dissertation entitled "A Parameter Estimation Framework for Fusing Spatio-temporal Data in Watershed Analysis and its Potential for RC-based Hardware Acceleration" to his PhD committees on April 29, 2009. He successfully defended, thus achieving doctoral status. Dr. Nagarajan will be working for Dr. Jasmeet Judge as a Post-doctoral associate in the Center for Remote Sensing in Agricultural and Biological Engineering starting May 2009.

ASPL students pass PhD oral defense ASPL students Hyun-chong Cho and Sweungwon Cheung presented their dissertations to their PhD committees on March 30, 2009 and April 10, 2009, respectively. They both successfully defended, thus achieving doctoral status.  Dr. Cho's dissertation is titled "Detection of Fluvial Landforms Underneath Forests Using LiDAR Data."  Dr. Cheung's dissertation is titled "Efficient Multiscale Image Fusion and Feature Reduction for Coastal Urban Areas."

ASPL student passes PhD oral prospectus defense ASPL student Tristan Cossio presented his dissertation proposal to his PhD committee in October, 2008. He successfully defended, thus achieving status as a PhD candidate.

ASPL students pass PhD oral defense ASPL students Jhon Caceres and Michael Starek presented their dissertations to their PhD committees in the Fall 2008 semester. They both successfully defended, thus achieving doctoral status. Dr. Caceres is now an Auxiliar Professor at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia, giving lectures in GIS and Geomatics courses, and working for the Geomatics Research Group in the Civil Engineering Department. Dr. Starek was awarded a National Research Council (NRC) Research Associateship award to pursue independent research in lidar supported by the US Army Research Office (ARO) at North Carolina State University. The NRC Research Associateship is an internationally competitive award administered by the National Academies for one year with option of renewal.

Dr. Gerry Mader Guest Lecture Dr. Gerry Mader, Chief of the Geosciences Research Division at the National Geodetic Survey in Maryland, will be presenting his talk entitled "Kinematic Positioning With GPS: How is it done, how do you know if it’s right, and how good is it?" on November 6, 2008 at the University of Florida. This presentation describes in detail Dr. Mader's techniques for kinematic GPS positioning and examines the means by which solutions are evaluated. This includes the integer fixing technique, tropospheric estimation, antenna calibration for the airplane and operational procedures. Dr. Gerald Mader received a B.A. in Physics from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland. He joined the National Geodetic Survey in 1983 and currently serves as the Chief of the Geosciences Research Division. Dr. Mader has primarily focused his attention on static and kinematic applications of the GPS.

ASPLer presents at ICIP ASPL student Michael Starek presented two posters at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in San Antonio, TX September 16-19. The posters are titled "Morphological Processing of Severely Occluded Digital Elevation Images to Extract And Connect Stream Channels" and "Shoreline Based Feature Extraction and Optimal Feature Selection for Segmenting Airborne Lidar Intensity Images."

ASPLer presents at GSRP symposium GSRP fellowship recipient and ASPL student, Tristan Cossio, presented his research poster titled "Numerical Modeling of Airborne Photon-Counting LIDAR" at the GSRP symposium in Washington D.C. Setpember 19-21, 2007. The symposium was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Research update presented to U.S. Army Profs. Clint Slatton and Will Wright presented a research update titled "Estimation of Sunlight Flux and GPS Attenuation in Forested Terrain from Lidar Data" at the Joint ARO-ERDC Review Meeting of ARO Terrestrial Science Program Basic Research. The meeting was held September 24-25, 2007 at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory in Vicksburg, MS.

ASPL student passes PhD oral prospectus defense ASPL student Karthik Nagarajan presented "A Parameter Estimation Framework for Fusing Multi-modal Remote Sensing Data Applied to Watershed Systems" to his PhD committee on September 4, 2007. He successfully defended, thus achieving status as a PhD candidate.

The Lidar Remote-sensing Education Network (LREN) is now online! Dr. Slatton created LREN to complement ASPL and NCALM activities by providing a vehicle for education and outreach.

The NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC) became operational from January 2007.

Office of Naval Research (ONR) award Prof. Clint Slatton would serve as the PI in this $300k project that is titled "Probabilistic Graphical Models for Data Co-Registration and Contact Fusion" and would span over 3 years. The project would investigate graphical model inference approaches to fuse sonar and other underwater sensor data for the purpose of improved mine detection via mitigation of redundant detects and false alarms.

US Army Research Office (ARO) award Prof. Clint Slatton would serve as the PI in this project that is titled "Predictive Modeling of Diffractive and Non-Diffractive Propagation in Forested Terrain". The project will provide $232k for 3 years. The work aims at characterizing signal propagation in complex 3D volumes using lidar data and simplified physical models.

ASPLers submit invited papers Invited paper titled " Improved Classification of Building Infrastructure from Airborne Lidar Data Using Spin Images and Fusion with Ground-Based Lidar " by ASPL student Jhon Caceres and Prof. Clint Slatton was accepted at URBAN 2007 conference held in Paris. Invited paper titled "Probabilistic Fusion of Spatio-Temporal Data to Estimate Stream Flow via Bayesian Networks " authored by ASPL students Karthik Nagarajan, Carolyn Krekeler and Prof. Clint Slatton was accepted at IGARSS 2007 conference held in Barcelona.

New National Science Foundation (NSF) award Prof. Clint Slatton is a co-I on a team led by Prof. Wendy Graham that was awarded an NSF grant this spring. The grant is titled "Design and demonstration of a distributed sensor array for predicting water flow and nitrate flux in the Santa Fe Basin". It will provide $360k for 2 years. The project was awarded through the Hydrology Program Office of NSF's Earth Sciences (EAR) Division. [http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=EAR/] Wendy Graham is the founding director of the UF Water Institute [http://waterinstitute.ufl.edu/], and Clint Slatton is a member of the Institute.

New funding from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) CCE Prof. Andrew Kennedy and ECE Prof. Clint Slatton put in a proposal to the US Army Corps of Engineers for a 2-year grant to fund graduate student research. The $73k award is titled "Three Dimensional Bathymetric Effects on Storm Induced Shoreline Response". It will partially support one of Prof. Kennedy's students and one of Prof. Slatton's students to work closely together on their PhD dissertations. This award competition was offered through USACE's Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX)[http://shoals.sam.usace.army.mil/].

IGARSS'06 special session on lidar applications Prof. Clint Slatton organized and will co-chair the invited session: Information Extraction from Airborne Lidar Data, along with Purdue University Prof. Melba Crawford at the IGARSS'06 conference this summer in Denver, CO. IGARSS is the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium [http://www.igarss06.org/].

ASPL student is awarded a Navy summer internship and a NASA graduate fellowship ASPL student Tristan Cossio was recently awarded a summer internship and a multi-year national fellowship. The internship will start in June, 2006. It will be with the US Navy's Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, FL [http://www.ncsc.navy.mil/]. In the fall, his fellowship will start. It is from the NASA Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP), and will be coordinated from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center [http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/]. For both the internship and fellowship, Tristan will work on hardware and software design for single-photon airborne laser scanner technologies. He is a Ph.D. student in the Signals and Systems area of the ECE Department under the direction of Prof. Clint Slatton.

ASPL student accepted for summer term at the International Space University ASPL student Juan Fernandez was recently accepted to spend the summer 2006 term at the International Space University [http://www.isunet.edu/] in Strasbourg, France. Juan is a Fulbright Scholar from Honduras in the Geosensing area of the CCE Department under the direction of Prof. Ramesh Shrestha and Prof. Clint Slatton. Juan will work on the design of space-based remote sensing missions.

ASPL student is awarded USDA summer internship ASPL student Kittipat (Bot) Kampa was recently selected for a summer internship at the Southwest Watershed Research Center (SWRC) in Tucson, AZ [http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=53424500]. The SWRC is part of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) within the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA). Bot will work on developing processing and analysis algorithms for filtering vegetation signals out of laser scanning data and characterizing the fine-scale surface morphology of semi-arid range lands using probabilistic methods. This work will support the development of improved erosion models for grasslands and ranges lands in semi-arid regions.

ASPL student is awarded LG Electronics summer internship ASPL student I-Gil Kim was recently selected for a summer internship with the Korean company LG Electronics. [http://us.lge.com/products/category/list/main.jhtml]. LG Electronics develops technology for mobile phone, TV, audio, video, and computer products. I-Gil will work in the LG Research & Development Center in Seoul, Korea on image and video processing algorithms.

New airborne laser processing class offered for Fall 2006 Prof. Clint Slatton will offer a new class on airborne laser ranging this fall. The class is titled CCE 6516/EEL 5934 Airborne Laser Scanning: Data Processing and Analysis. Airborne laser ranging is becoming the dominant technology for measuring the 3D structure of the Earth's surface at high resolution. However, significant knowledge of GPS position estimation, signal processing, and photonics is needed in order to process the data into a useful form and successfully analyze it. The primary objective of this course is to teach students how acquire, process, and analyze laser ranging data acquired from an airborne platform. The resulting data are very important for modern hydrology, geomorphology, forestry, shoreline monitoring, construction, urban planning, and other environmental disciplines. The class Web site can be found at [http://www.slatton.ece.ufl.edu/Teaching/2006Fall/CCE6516_Fall2006.html].

ASPL participation in CHREC workshop Prof. Clint Slatton participated in the CHREC workshop, which was held at UF in April, 2006. CHREC is the proposed NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing. The workshop brought together representatives from many companies and government labs who are interested in becoming members of the CHREC consortium. It is anticipated that CHREC will become operational in the winter of 2006, at which time ASPL students will actively collaborate with students in UF Prof. Alan George's High-performance Computing and Simulation (HCS) Research Laboratory [http://www.hcs.ufl.edu/chrec/] on joint projects.