In article ,
(Bill Bogen) wrote:

Thomas Billings wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Bill Bogen) wrote:

Thomas Billings wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Bill Bogen) wrote:

snip
Any idea how many person-hours were consumed?

Between our team, the very nice Sun Software Engineers who volunteered
their time from their Portland area office, the company that donated the
Suns, the Caltech Grad students who tried to help us after their team
leader left for Redmond, and a few others, probably about 150-200+
manhours.

Sigh!



The head of that software project quit Caltech and joined Microsoft in
the middle of our efforts. 'Nuff said!

If not, did anyone ever begin a
_manual_ search of the 620,000 high-resolution visible-light
Clementine images?

We looked at this, and looked at our local support group, and quailed!

Why? Isn't the human eye&brain a wonderful pattern recognition
device? Maybe I'm being naive here but I'd set up the project this
way: 10 people each sitting in front of a PC for about 2 hours a day.

We didn't have 10 people.

Maybe, if done as an Internet project, enough people could be
recruited to make this happen.

Display an image. The person decides whether it is a possible
lavatube and flags it with a keystroke. Since the vast bulk of
pictures will be rejects, I'd expect an average rate of about 1
sec/image. We'd be done in 9 days. Let's triple that and let each
image be seen by 3 people; we'd rank each image by consensus. Let's
pay each person $10/hr: labor cost = $5,167. Even adding costs for
software to present the images and record flags, project management,
etc, this still seems pretty cheap.

This is true with sufficiently fast download times. Back then we didn't
have that for our team. For some on our team, we don't today.

Nowadays, with DSL and multi-gig hard drives, I'm not so concerned
about whether people and hardware can be gathered. A bigger question
may be: is this neurologically feasible? IOW, do you think that the
photos are of sufficient resolution, contrast, etc that
properly-trained people might actually detect signs of lava tubes?

Indeed, there's the rub! Even though Dr. Shoemaker was very encouraging
when he visited us in late 1994, he did warn us that the photos were
optimized for geochemical sensing, not for detecting terrain
differentials. They tried for direct overhead shots at local noon, for
maximum reflection for their suite of multi-spectral sensors. This makes
for few, if any, shadows, the keys to terrain. We have too little
experience with the larger suite of Clementine photos to know for sure
how easy others will find it. I found it hard, by eyeball.

If
so, how might the people be trained, assuming this were done via
Internet? Perhaps work up a quiz/tutorial of images (some suspected
by experts of showing signs of lava tubes and some not) and only
select the highest scoring individuals? Or better yet, let anyone
play but, when later forming a consensus/score for a given Clementine
image, weight that person's choices by their score on the quiz?

Unless someone out there has done more than the minimal amount of
eyeball work we did with the pictures in finding terrain features, this
last idea seems a bit more hopefull to me.

I would recommend starting at :

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementine.html

There is a browser for the images, as well as much Clementine
information in links and pages.

Regards,

Tom Billings

--
Oregon L-5 Society

http://www.oregonl5.org/