Extraction of Environmental Data from On-Line Environmental Information Sources

Analysis of environmental information is considered of utmost importance for humans, since environmental conditions are strongly related to health issues and to a variety of everyday activities. Despite the fact that there are already many free on-line services providing environmental information, there are several cases, in which the presentation format complicates the extraction and processing of such data. A very characteristic example is the air quality forecasts, which are usually encoded in image maps of heterogeneous formats, while the initial (numerical) pollutant concentrations, calculated and predicted by a relevant model, remain unavailable. This work addresses the task of semi-automatic extraction of such information based on a template configuration tool, on methodologies for data reconstruction from images, as well as on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. The framework is tested with a number of air quality forecast heatmaps demonstrating satisfactory results.

[1]  Jaakko Kukkonen,et al.  A European chemical weather forecasting portal , 2011 .

[2]  Gerald Schimak,et al.  Environmental Software Systems , 1996, IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing.

[3]  Jaakko Kukkonen,et al.  Evaluation of the Accuracy of an Inverse Image-Based Reconstruction Method for Chemical Weather Data , 2012 .

[4]  Thomas C. Henderson,et al.  Raster Map Image Analysis , 2009, 2009 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[5]  Kostas Karatzas.  INTERNET-BASED MANAGEMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL SIMULATION TASKS , 2005 .

[6]  Jaakko Kukkonen,et al.  A European open access chemical weather forecasting portal , 2011 .

[7]  Yiannis Kompatsiaris,et al.  Building an Environmental Information System for Personalized Content Delivery , 2011, ISESS.

[8]  Kostas Karatzas,et al.  Chapter Fourteen Computational Air Quality Modelling , 2008 .

[9]  M.T. Musavi,et al.  Map processing methods: an automated alternative , 1988, [1988] Proceedings. The Twentieth Southeastern Symposium on System Theory.

[10]  Anastasios Bassoukos,et al.  A method for the inverse reconstruction of environmental data applicable at the Chemical Weather portal , 2010 .

[11]  Mikhail Sofiev,et al.  COST ES0602: towards a European network on chemical weather forecasting and information systems , 2009 .

[12]  Kostas Karatzas,et al.  Fusion of Environmental Information for the Delivery of Orchestrated Services for the Atmospheric Environment in the PESCaDO project , 2012 .

[13]  J. Skilling,et al.  Algorithms and Applications , 1985 .

[14]  A. Fahre Vik,et al.  COST ES 0602 : Towards a European Network on Chemical Weather Forecasting and Information Systems , 2007 .

[15]  Chew Lim Tan,et al.  Text/Graphics Separation in Maps , 2001, GREC.

[16]  Jaakko Kukkonen,et al.  A New Environmental Image Processing Method for Chemical Weather Forecasts in Europe , 2011, ITEE.