Fugro EarthData MAPPS Project of the Year Award

28 August 2008, 11:17am

Frederick MD, 28 August 2008 - Fugro EarthData’s Texas Benthic Mapping Project won top honors in the annual Geospatial Products and Services Excellence Awards competition, sponsored by the Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors (MAPPS).

Named “Project of the Year,” the company’s landmark effort to automate seagrass habitat mapping along the U.S. Gulf Coast pioneered a new semi-automated process for image classification; a task that formerly required time-intensive manual photointerpretation methods.

Fugro EarthData’s approach to the Texas Benthic Mapping Project combined high resolution digital airborne imagery with object-oriented feature extraction software and
classification and regression tree (CART) analysis. Applicable to land-based or shallowwater mapping, the innovative methodology streamlines production, eliminates bias and inconsistency, and provides quantitative accuracy assessment.

“By all accounts, the Texas Benthic Mapping Project is a fine example of how the private
and public sectors can work together toward the common goals of improved data accuracy and increased production efficiencies,” said Fugro EarthData President Edward Saade. “We are thrilled to have won this award and share its honor with our team members, The Alta Vista Company and Avineon, Inc., as well as with our client, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Services Center and their project partners, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas A&M University Center for Coastal Studies.”

The September issue of POB magazine will include a feature about the MAPPS excellence awards; the current issue of Earth Imaging Journal details the Texas Benthic Mapping Project in its cover article.

Fugro EarthData

MAPPS

Geo: International