{"id":1710,"date":"2022-08-30T00:17:03","date_gmt":"2022-08-30T00:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2024-02-26T14:02:48","modified_gmt":"2024-02-26T14:02:48","slug":"collaborative-drone-project-facilitates-miami-dade-county-project-to-map-human-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/collaborative-drone-project-facilitates-miami-dade-county-project-to-map-human-activity\/","title":{"rendered":"Collaborative Drone Project Facilitates Miami-Dade County Project to Map Human Activity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Mader<\/strong> laughs when thinking about his first test runs with drones. It was seven years ago and the data scientist at the University of Miami\u2019s Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) was constantly frustrated by the finicky, crash-prone devices. \u201cIt was almost a coin toss whether it would come back in one piece,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"University<\/p>\n

\"orangeBut after years of advancements in drone technology, Mader and his team are using two high-tech unmanned aerial vehicles for an ever-growing list of projects. They create high-resolution maps of informal settlements in Latin America<\/a>. They generate 3D recreations of historic buildings from Coral Gables<\/a> to Cura\u00e7ao<\/a>. And now, Mader\u2019s team is helping map activity in Miami-Dade County parks to enhance the health of the county\u2019s residents.<\/p>\n

\"JoannaJoanna Lombard<\/strong>, a Professor in the School of Architecture, and co-principal investigator Tyler Harrison<\/strong>, a Professor in the School of Communication<\/span><\/a>, were awarded a $475,000 grant from the Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade County<\/a> to conduct the county parks project. The study calls for precise measurements of human activity in six parks at 72 different moments in time to gauge how they\u2019re being used before and after a series of changes are made at three of the parks.<\/p>\n

That work requires counting the number of people and cars in each park during each timepoint, a monumental challenge.<\/p>\n

\"TylerLombard calculated that for the largest parks, it could take over a dozen people assigned to different sections of each park to complete each survey, a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. That\u2019s when they turned to Mader\u2019s team at IDSC. They realized they could use drones to create highly-detailed, high-resolution maps of each park, with the potential to train a computer to count each person and car with each pass.<\/p>\n

Lombard said that combination has made the activity counts less taxing, more accurate, and more useful. \u201cThese aren\u2019t just small areas where we can say, \u2018You take that half and I\u2019ll take that half.\u2019 You might need to have 15 people to cover multiple quadrants,\u201d she said. \u201cThe drone flies over the whole park and you capture it in that moment of time. It resolves the issue of time and space by the instantaneous nature of what it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study builds on Miami-Dade County\u2019s Parks and Open Space System Master Plan<\/a> that calls for a transition from parks designed for a suburban, car-oriented culture to an interconnected series of parks better suited for the higher-density, pedestrian-friendly communities growing throughout the county. With the population in Miami continuing to grow, and the remaining open spaces in the county being gobbled up by developers, the county needs to maximize the 12,000 acres of park space it already operates.<\/p>\n

\"TimThat\u2019s where the UM study comes in. In the first series of surveys conducted in the spring, Mader and Timothy Norris<\/strong>, a data scientist at IDSC who specializes in drones, conducted 36 flights over six of the largest county parks to better understand how people use them. They then handed the images collected over to Abraham Parrish<\/strong>, a GIS Services Librarian who is tweaking computer vision software to combine the images and identify each person and car visible in the park.<\/p>\n

\"AbrahamMader said the drones generate thousands of individual snapshots, but the true power of Parrish\u2019s work comes from the creation of one \u201corthomosaic image\u201d covering the entire park. Created by stitching together overlapping images, orthomosaic images contain higher-resolution imagery than satellite images and are more precise than basic composite images.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because basic composite images contain all kinds of distortions based on the angle from which each object is captured. For example, a building can appear to be leaning the farther they are from the center of the image. Orthomosaic images correct for those distortions using algorithms designed to \u201cflatten\u201d everything, creating a true sense of scale and distances.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll<\/em> of the buildings, you have the correct dimensions of them,\u201d Mader said.<\/p>\n

Working with the UM team, Miami-Dade County Parks<\/a><\/span> department planners and county partners will then make changes to the infrastructure in and around each park. That will include new entry gates so that nearby residents don\u2019t have to walk around blocks to enter or new crosswalks to make it easier for pedestrians to cross at the park\u2019s entrance.<\/p>\n

\"Miami-Dade<\/p>\n

The IDSC team will conduct another 36 drone surveys later in 2022 to see how the changes altered the usage of each park. The end result, they hope, is a blueprint that can be replicated in other parks to maximize their efficiency to make it easier for residents to access parks and, ultimately, improve their health.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are neighborhoods that are underserved and have the most vulnerable populations,\u201d Lombard said. \u201cThe disease burdens that those populations carry\u2014diabetes, hypertension, obesity\u2014these are things that we know have behavioral impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLife is all of us inhabiting this place and living together, and when a team can come together like that, it\u2019s so much richer.\u201d<\/h3>\n

\"ChrisThe parks project also highlights a foundational principle of IDSC. Rather than each school and department at UM working independently, the Institute is pushing for more interdisciplinary projects that bring together experts in different disciplines who can bring unique approaches to each research project. In the case of the parks project, Mader and Norris represent IDSC, Lombard represents the School of Architecture<\/a><\/span>, Harrison and colleagues Jennifer Miranda<\/strong> (photo not available) and Chris Koelsch<\/strong> represent the School of Communication<\/a><\/span>, and Parrish represents UM Librarie<\/span>s<\/a>. The team also includes faculty and students from the Miller School of Medicine<\/a> <\/span>and the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife isn\u2019t one intellectual construct,\u201d Lombard said. \u201cLife is all of us inhabiting this place and living together, and when a team can come together like that, it\u2019s so much richer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team will continue working on the parks project until they publish their results in 2023, but Mader is already looking ahead to using his drones on other collaborations at the University. He\u2019s already working with the School of Architecture to produce a 3D rendering of the Coral Gables Congregational Church<\/a><\/span>, across from the Biltmore Hotel<\/a><\/span>, as the church\u2019s 100th anniversary approaches. He\u2019s talking with the University\u2019s Facilities and Operations<\/a><\/span> department to help them create a campus-wide map of every tree on campus. And he\u2019s looking into adding multispectral and thermal cameras to his drones to measure heat maps in some of the most urbanized corners of Miami.<\/p>\n

Mader said none of that would have been imaginable when he first started playing with his first drones. \u201cNow they\u2019re totally reliable,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are really useful tools. They make people\u2019s lives easier.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Story by Alan R. Gomez<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Mader laughs when thinking about his first test runs with drones. It was seven years ago and the data scientist at the University of Miami\u2019s Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) was constantly frustrated by the finicky, crash-prone devices. \u201cIt was almost a coin toss whether it would come back in one piece,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[634,183],"tags":[677,682,70,680,679,673,681,674,678,489,676,675],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2527,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/2527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idsc.miami.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}