Searching for Bob Norton's Plane

So a few weeks ago, Bob Norton’s missionary plane went down in the jungle of Venezuela and no one has found the wreckage. (or Bob and group, if they are still alive). The country doesn’t have search and rescue operations set up. So there are some ideas on how to get around that. Google Earth is being commissioned to take high resolution photos of the jungle area where he went down. That should will us details of objects a few feet across and bigger. So using the photos, we can try to locate the wreckage, calculate the GPS coordinates, then have a plane fly over for a closer look. However, sorting through hundreds of photos manually would take too long (especially if there is hope he might have survived the crash) to speed up the process, one of my friends is writing a program to search the photos and I get to help him with a small part of it.

Just like when you are setting up a query with constraints to search a database, this can be done to search the photos. Ideas for constraints are: search for anything not green, isolate edges, and check for small clearings were the trees have been obstructed/ or taken down by a plane. So while we wait for the satellite photos to come in, we can work on some stuff. My part is to download sample satellite photos of plane wrecks in trees. Then I will work in photoshop to make the wreckage more visible. While I am working, I will record what filters and settings I use to enhance the photo. Then I send my work off to zach, who will write my data into his program code. After we test the program, he will apply it to all the photos from Google. I am hoping to talk to Southern’s computing department and see if I can work it out to use their cluster (super computer) for a day and run all the data on that. (zachs computer would take maybe a week to process all the data). After that, we will have a smaller batch of pics to sort through. These will have a much higher probability of Norton’s location.

Then we can have pple sign up to take a small set of photos and look at them manually. By roughly the third time we eliminate photos, we should have it isolated to just a few places where the plane wreck could be. Then they could have a plane fly over those spots for a closer look. That way, the limit funds to send out searches will be saved for the most likely spots instead of spending it all up on random guesses. Anyways, zach put together a website with information about the search at: http://flowerbed.dyndns.org/findbobnorton/index.html