Welcome to FO.S.T.ER. project web site

 

 

The FOSTER project ("Spatio-temporal data mining: application to the understanding and monitoring of soil erosion") is a three-year project launched in January 2011. This computer science project is founded by the French National Research Agency ANR. This project aims at providing to geologists a semi-automatic and complete process for monitoring soil erosion. This process will be based on multi-temporal very high resolution satellite images coupled with digital elevation model (DEM), sensor data and/or expert knowledge. The project will focus more precisely on two important aspects of this process: segmentation of satellite images based on collaborative methods, and construction of descriptive (patterns, clustering, …) and predictive (decision trees, …) spatio-temporal models.

 

 

 

 

This project focuses his study on New Caledonia, a biodiversity hotspot and a first rank environmental observatory. Protecting and managing such a fragile environment due to major mining projects and an increasing population, are major challenges. To valid the genericity of the proposed process, the project will also study another geographical area in the southern part of French Alps.

FOSTER tackles the following problems:

  1. how domain knowledge can be discovered in complex environmental data (heterogeneous, multi-scale, incomplete and composed of complex objects),
  2. which spatio-temporal patterns can be used to model dynamic systems, and
  3. how data mining methods can be combined to provide more relevant knowledge to experts.


This multidisciplinary consortium is composed of

  1. Computer scientists of the LIRIS, LSIIT, LISTIC and PPME (coordinator) laboratories, specialists in data mining and image processing,
  2. Geologists of the PPME and IPGS laboratories, with a strong knowledge in soil erosion mechanisms
  3. Bluecham Company, specialist in decision support systems.