Falls firm takes photography a step beyond Electronic Devices Inc?. No, its not an outfit that makes tiny microphones that private detectives place in telephones to overhear conversations. No, it isn't a firm that manufac tures light bulbs nor is it a venture into TV tubes or stereophonic record players. Talk to Pete Schumacher for an hour or so and you realize that his firm, which he calls Electronic Devices Inc., is doing something that the world may well be waiting for. Schumacher talks about such things as image enhancement and photogrammetry. Equipment for this operation can form a 3-dimension picture of Christ taken from the Shroud of Turin. It can detail the 100-year flood plain for the Yellowstone Basin. IT CAN TELL how much wheat is being grown in Russia, Argentina, Australia. It can blow the whistle on illegal mining operations. It can isolate cancer tissue and determine the spread. And, with tongue in cheek, it can design wallpaper to fit any mood. WOW! You think this equipment maybe can do about anything. Schumacher agrees. Schumacher starts out his explaination with a black and white picture taken by an EROS satellite showing about 13,000 square miles of the earth's surface. A mounted electronic camera scans the picture and projects it on a TV screen nearby. ALTHOUGH THE picture looks black and white Schumacher explains that most of it is gray and there are a wide spectrum of grays in the picture. He says the human eye can discern about 16 shades of gray. The camera can see 64 different shades. By turning a dial, the TV tube suddenly becomes a pattern of brilliant colors. Twist a knob and through the magic of electronics, Schumacher can assign a different color to any of the shades of gray projected from the satellite photo. Say, a certain shade of gray is known to be wheat. By assigning one color to that shade, all the wheat in the photograph, and remember about 13,000 square miles of the earth is pictured, will stand out. Electronic soners will instantly determine how many square miles of EROS (Earth Resources Observa- "What we do," says Schumacher, "is take a picture apart electronically." giving emphasis to those areas which need to be studied. Replace the wheat coloration for timberlands, and the world's forest resources stand out on the screen to be measured and analyzed. On a much smaller scale, medical researchers can look at photographs of cancers in much the same way and know where the infected tissue ends and the healthy tissue begins. ILLEGAL STRIP mining operations were in the news a few years ago. Image enhancement can tell from a satellite picture if even an acre of ground is disturbed and authorities can take quick action to halt the activities. State officials are to be briefed on before-and-after pictures of flooding on the Yellowstone River. Measure the difference between the two and the 100-year flood plain is detailed. Insurance rates and construction projects could rise or fall on the information the photos reveal. The wallpaper suggestion came. about because the image inhancement equipment has virtually no limit to the colors it can produce. Great Falls is unique in that one of the world's 150 systems is located in the Rocky Mountain Building here. About half of the units are in the U.S. and the others in foreign countries. Since September, Schumacher has repaired units in Denver, Kansas City, Sioux Falls, S.D., Albuquerque, N. M., and Oxford, Miss. He expects to go to Toronto and Albuquerque this month on service calls. When he was working for ISI, (Interpretation Systems, Inc.) he traveled 100,000 miles a year servicing the 150 units. HE IS NOW WORKING on a plan to feed photographs electronically into · weather forecasts. As Schumacher explains it a satellite doesn't send a weather picture as such. It sends a series of electronic signals that must be deciphered or translated in Washington D.C. This takes ab 20 minutes for a still pic . ture to be formed. In order to get sequence pictures and thus form a moving picture of weather systems, the stills have to be re-photographed and the resulting effect is a motion picture. This takes a relatively long time. Schumacher will skip the re-photographing process and feed electronic signals directly into his system thus creating a motion picture of the weather almost as it is happening. He also has available lens installations that will flash TV pictures on a large screen. He feels that industries could use these in group conferences to make closed circuit TV pictures, graphs and the like easily viewed. SCHUMACHER SEES his equipment as a valuable asset to land management, tax assessment, detailing water and timber resources. It takes. months and even years to acquire information by ground surveys, Schumacher points out. He feels there will always be a need for this type of inspection. However, photography coupled with image inhancement will do much of the same work in hours or da's. Current information is then GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE Section 5 Page 43 February 18, 1979 High Country News, August 22, 1979-7 ASCS develops new way to survey ag acreage By WILLIAM NELL Yellowstone Newspapers A creative response to a budget cut may have led to a new approach in determining farm acreage in Montana that could be copied on a nationwide scale. : In the last six months, the state office of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service has developed a method of using videotape to quickly update its aerial maps of Montana cropland. It's the first progress in measuring acreage since the agency was founded in the early 1930's. Though still in the experimental stage, state officials will demonstrate their new system to ASCS national of ficials in the first week of September. If they like the way it works, it could be a model for state ASCS offices nationwide in keeping up with their annual chore of cross-checking acreages. ASCS has used an outdated manual method of planimetry to determine · acreages that showed up on aerial maps for the past 40 years. To insure compliance with all ASCS program guidelines, participating farmers must report their acreages to ASCS by July 15. After that, ASCS crosschecks acreage to determine whether or not mistakes were made or if some farmers are truly meeting the guidelines. Normally this procedure was done on the field by randomly selecting 20 percent of the participating producers and manually cross-checking their acreages on ground. If the new system proves itself out, "hopefully we can eliminate farm visits altogether," said Dale Nerlin, ASCS program specialist. Nerlin was the one who came up with the idea of using videotape to monitor farm acreage last March. Prompted by a cut in the travel budget by 26 percent last fall, the state office had purchased a video camera and several recorders to use in training its personnel in the 46 county offices statewide. Then it occurred to Nerlin to try to use the video equipment in the annual annual acreage check. Ile had no prior training in electronics or camerawork, but convinced the national office to approve ex perimenting with the new approach. Nerlin contacted Pete Schumacher of Electronic Devices Incorporated in Great Falls, who engineered and developed a"Linear TV measuring set" that interprets and analyzes the videotapes and translates the video information into acreage figures for specific fields, as determined by the operator. The videotapes are shot from a plane equipped for aerial photography with a self-levelling mount from an altitude of about 7,500 feet. This is much closer than the normal height of 20,000 fect used in the statewide aerial photography effort done every 10 years. The videotapes should allow ASCS to immediately update their aerial maps whenever needed, Nerlin said. If Washington officials react favorably, ACCS could be videotaping all Montana cropland as early as next summer. Federal officials will decide whether or not the system needs more testing before it is expanded. But the counties of Custer, Gallatin, Lake, Cascade, Glacier, and Garfield, have been tagged to participate in the video program next summer. Preliminary taping occured in Liberty and Choteau counties this summer in conjunction with testing the new system. To date the project has cost the state ASCS office an additional $17,000 which they have funded out of their own budget without an additional appropriation. Here's how it works: Color videotapes of cropland are played back and stopped, isolating a single frame, which is then superimposed on the old aerial photo of the same arca. Based on the different colors, specific crops can often be identified, or an eletronic probe can trace out a certain field on the TV screen and the Linear TV Measuring Set will give a digital readout of the acreage of the arca. By superimposing the videotape picture over the aerial photo, the set will recalibrate the scale of the taped picture because the shots are obviously taken at different altitudes from the plane. Nerlin said each TV picture is composed of C5,000 different "pixels" which means he can isolate acreages down to very small increments with relative accuracy. Nerlin said the national office has been emphasizing the use of 35 mm slides in the annual acreage checks, but nobody's been using video," Nerlin said. Nerlin said use of slides can be a large annual expense and take a great deal of time developing and cataloging in addition to transcribing the information to the aerial maps. In the last six months there have been hundreds of phone calls, and Schumacher has worked over his set many times before refining the final product, Nerlin said. "My feeling is that this thing is going to go. I don't think there's any question of it," Nerlin optimistically said. Sunday, arch Great Falls Tribune Canada buys Falls-made technology Electronic Devices Inc., located in the Rocky Mountain Building, delivered two linear measuring systems to branches of the Canadian government last week with Pete Schumacher, firm president and founder, making the delivery of the $45,000 worth of the equipment personally. Schumacher took the two units to Toronto, where one was turned over to Dr. Stuart Waterman of Atmospheric Environment of Canada, Meteorology Research Division, while the other went to Dr. Simsek Pala of the Ontario Center for Remote Sensing. While Schumacher was in Toronto, Pala gave the first of a series of seminars he is presenting using the set. Pala is using the set in technology transfer and his program is for industry and to keep government people up to date with current technologies. The first seminar group of 25 were college professors. The LMS is an electronic device which will extract picture information more subtle than the eye can see, analyze change, and accurately measure areas and distances in photographs, x-rays, television images, drawings and maps as they are seen on a television monitor. 5-E Environment, energy conservation, forestry, hydrology, mineral resources, public utility services, manufacturing and military functions are just. a few of the many diverse areas demanding the efficiency and practicality of which the LMS is capable. One of the local firm's devices is now in use in Germany. Schumacher said his staff is now completing its first production run of 15 units. Eight of the 15 have been sold, he said, and a second production run is being contemplated. It takes from 60 to 90 days for a production run, Schumacher said, depending on the availability of components. However, virtually all the highly technical electronic equipment is manufactured in Great Falls. |