Can Remote Sensing Computational Imaging Help Fight Environmental Challenges?
Dr Oktay Karakus, Cardiff University
In-person (Psychology Common Room, Social Sciences Complex, Priory Road, BS8 1TU) and online via Zoom.
Abstract
Our planet Earth faces numerous environmental problems recently, such as global warming, destruction of forests, wildfires, illegal hunting, and extinction of various living creatures. Specifically, the oceans, despite providing a livelihood for more than 3 billion people whilst being the habitat for billions of species, have been in danger (especially ocean wildlife) due to the large needs of the human population and the unconscious use of petroleum products. Earth observation tools such as the airborne and space-borne remote sensing modalities (optical, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)) have shown great potential to date in various applications: to name but a few: (1) detecting/tracking land and water-based pollutants, (2) land cover use, (3) illegal fishing/hunting activities, (4) forest biodiversity monitoring, and (5) early detection systems for wildfires. Each remote sensing modality, due to covering vast areas and high-resolution imagery, consists of a huge amount of data samples which makes their processing a challenging task. Up to date, advanced computational imaging methodology has provided various solutions for the aforementioned environmental challenges via remote sensing imagery. This talk presents a review of the current technological advances in remote sensing computational imaging for applications of environmental problems and discusses examples of machine learning techniques for environmental problems such as air quality measurement, marine debris and suspected plastics mapping, land cover mapping, forest observation and illegal fishing.
Biography
Dr Oktay Karakus is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University. He received his B.Sc. degree in electronics engineering (with Honours) from Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey in 2009. Followed by an M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics and communication engineering from the İzmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH), Turkey, in 2012 and 2018, respectively. He has been awarded the 2020 IEEE Turkey Ph.D. Thesis Award.
Before joining Cardiff University, between 2018 and 2021, he was with the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the University of Bristol as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.
He has co-authored over 30 scientific publications and is a member of IEEE and IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Contact information
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