The Featured Article in this month’s June PE&RS journal is our own Dr. Roger Hoffer!
Computer-Aided Analysis of Multispectral Scanner Data – The Beginnings
By Roger M. Hoffer
In the late 1950’s, the Agricultural Board of the National Research Council was concerned about the impact of insects and diseases on crops and forests throughout this country and the world. Therefore, in 1960 a committee was formed to investigate the potential of aerial surveys for monitoring insect and disease infestations in agricultural crops and forests (National Research Council Committee on Remote Sensing for Agricultural Purposes, 1970). This committee was chaired by Dr. J. Ralph Shay, then Head of the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University. One of the key people on the committee was Dr. Robert N. Colwell, of the Forestry Department, University of California. Bob (Robert) was an expert in photo interpretation, and was considered to be “Mr. Remote Sensing” in the United States at that time, and he played a critical role in the activities of the committee. Another key person on this committee was Marvin Holter, from the Institute of Science and Technology (IST), University of Michigan. He was involved in a research project called Project Michigan, which was a classified military project that included work to develop an instrument called an “optical-mechanical scanner”. Such a scanner could be flown in airplanes to obtain imagery of the ground in different wavelength bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Mr. Holter believed that this optical-mechanical scanner had good potential for assessing agricultural cover types and conditions. The other committee members agreed that it would be worth evaluating, and Dr. Shay suggested that the Agronomy Farm at Purdue had many species of crops, with detailed “ground truth” information available, so would be an excellent test site.
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(June 3)