Rapid determination of soil organic matter content based on soil colour obtained by a digital camera

ABSTRACT

Soil organic matter (SOM) is an important component of soil and a significant criterion in determining the dynamics of soil quality. A rapid, low-cost method to measure SOM content is needed to support the development of precision agriculture. This article studied the quantitative relationship between SOM and soil colour using a digital camera, which is relatively inexpensive and easy to operate, as a portable tool for obtaining colour information of the soil surface. The results show that mixed samples with different soil particle sizes reduce the noise of the image and are more suitable than uniform soil samples for predicting the SOM. Among the three bands of red, green, and blue (RGB), the red band had the best correlation with SOM, and its reciprocal correlation coefficient (r) reached 0.75. The reciprocal regression model of the RGB colour model provided good prediction results for mixed soil samples, with a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.76 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.55, and the validation result had an excellent predictive ability (R²_val = 0.85 and RMSE_val = 0.53). The single-variation predictive model of CIELa*b* colour space model through transformation of the RGB colour space model performed well. The model built by colour intensity values had a strong stability and forecasting capacity. Thus, a digital camera can be used as an alternative tool to rapidly measure SOM.     

The Complexity of Flood Filling Games

We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n×n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles equal via the shortest possible sequence of flooding operations. In the standard version, a flooding operation consists of the player choosing a colour k, which then changes the colour of all the tiles in the monochromatic region connected to the top left tile to k. After this operation has been performed, neighbouring regions which are already of the chosen colour k will then also become connected, thereby extending the monochromatic region of the board. We show that finding the minimum number of flooding operations is NP-hard for c≥3 and that this even holds when the player can perform flooding operations from any position on the board. However, we show that this ‘free’ variant is in P for c=2. We also prove that for an unbounded number of colours, Flood-It remains NP-hard for boards of height at least 3, but is in P for boards of height 2. Next we show how a (c−1) approximation and a randomised 2c/3 approximation algorithm can be derived, and that no polynomial time constant factor, independent of c, approximation algorithm exists unless P=NP. We then investigate how many moves are required for the ‘most demanding’ n×n boards (those requiring the most moves) and show that the number grows as fast as Q(?c n)\Theta(\sqrt{c}\, n). Finally, we consider boards where the colours of the tiles are chosen at random and show that for c≥2, the number of moves required to flood the whole board is Ω(n) with high probability.     

Gestural systems for the voice: performance approaches and repertoire

ABSTRACT

Singing, like dance, emerges directly from the body. The voice, in combination with whole body movement, constitutes a potent form of self-expression. Gestural systems offer a specialized context in which to explore the intersection between voice and movement. The practice-based investigation presented in this article charts the development of an original musical work, Intangible Spaces, which gives form to the invisible aspects of voice and movement through gestural control, physical modelling synthesis and visual feedback. I draw on embodied and performative autoethnographic methods to capture the felt sensations and sound-movement associations that arise during the composition process. I also explore the performance approaches of key practitioners in the area to gain a broader understanding of the ways in which musicians leverage existing performance skills to uncover novel connections between movement and voice in gestural performance.     

Unwind: a musical biofeedback for relaxation assistance

Unwind is a musical biofeedback interface which combines nature sounds and sedative music into a form of New-Age music for relaxation exercises. The nature sounds respond to the user’s physiological data, functioning as an informative layer for biofeedback display. The sedative music aims to induce calmness and evoke positive emotions. UnWind incorporates the benefits of biofeedback and sedative music to facilitate deep breathing, moderate arousal, and promote mental relaxation. We evaluated Unwind in a 2?×?2 factorial experiment with music and biofeedback as independent factors. Forty young adults performed the relaxation exercise under one of the following conditions after experiencing a stressful task: Nature sounds only (NS), Nature sounds with music (NM), and Auditory biofeedback with nature sounds (NSBFB), and UnWind musical biofeedback (NMBFB). The results revealed a significant interaction effect between music and biofeedback on the improvement of heart rate variability. The combination of music and nature sounds also showed benefits in lowering arousal and reducing self-report anxiety. We conclude with a discussion of UnWind for biofeedback and the wider potential of blending nature sounds with music as a musical interface.     

Safety Certificate: an audification performance of high-speed trains

Safety Certificate is a musical performance based on sensor data from high-speed trains. The original purpose of this data is to provide a basis for the assessments of the mechanical aspects of train safety. In this performance, the data, which represents dynamical processes below the audible range, are converted into sound through audification. The sound that is generated live during the performance is manipulated through the Manta control interface, which allows for the convenient layering of 48 different timbres. Safety Certificate was premiered at Seconde Nature in Aix-en-Provence in March 2010 during the Sonification symposium–What, Where, How, Why, organized by Locus Sonus. The following short article gives details about the data, the audification technique, use of the control interface, and the musical structure of the performance.     

Stream segregation algorithm for pattern matching in polyphonic music databases

As music can be represented symbolically, most of the existing methods extend some string matching algorithms to retrieve musical patterns in a music database. However, not all retrieved patterns are perceptually significant because some of them are, in fact, inaudible. Music is perceived in groupings of musical notes called streams. The process of grouping musical notes into streams is called stream segregation. Stream-crossing musical patterns are perceptually insignificant and should be pruned from the retrieval results. This can be done if all musical notes in a music database are segregated into streams and musical patterns are retrieved from the streams. Findings in auditory psychology are utilized in this paper, in which stream segregation is modelled as a clustering process and an adapted single-link clustering algorithm is proposed. Supported by experiments on real music data, streams are identified by the proposed algorithm with considerable accuracy.

MUSIC,INFORMATION, AND THE GENERAL SYSTEMS PROBLEM SOLVER: A NEW ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

For nearly four decades, scientists and music theorists have proposed means to express musical style as information. The Shannon entropy has been used for this purpose based upon the following two assertions: (1) musical composition is essentially the selection of musical symbols within sets of constraints, and (2) a compositional process can be characterized mathematically in a general, abstract manner. Such proposals have been widely criticized, principally on the grounds that only limited numbers of parameters are considered in most cases, and then only in terms of how symbols representing pitch, harmony or rhythm are selected independently of the overall relationships which result from such selections. The ways in which pitch, harmony, and rhythm are interrelated is an issue that is virtually ignored. A major premise of the present discussion is that musical style can be expressed as information only in terms of mathematical relations on multiple sets of musical symbols. The General Systems Problem Solver (GSPS), developed by George Klir, may be utilized for this purpose.     

A case based approach to expressivity-aware tempo transformation

The research presented in this paper focuses on global tempo transformations of monophonic audio recordings of saxophone jazz performances. We are investigating the problem of how a performance played at a particular tempo can be rendered automatically at another tempo, while preserving naturally sounding expressivity. Or, differently stated, how does expressiveness change with global tempo. Changing the tempo of a given melody is a problem that cannot be reduced to just applying a uniform transformation to all the notes of a musical piece. The expressive resources for emphasizing the musical structure of the melody and the affective content differ depending on the performance tempo. We present a case-based reasoning system called TempoExpress for addressing this problem, and describe the experimental results obtained with our approach. Editor: Gerhard Widmer     

Effects of monitoring under high and low taskload on detection of flashing and coloured radar targets

Abstract

While midair collisions between aircraft are extremely rare occurrences, ‘near midair’, incidents are more common. The present study sought to evaluate the gains in conspicuity that might be realized if flashing or colour were added as redundant cues to indicate the presence of unexpected, non-tracked aircraft entering controlled airspace, and to examine the extent to which increased taskload and fatigue might influence the expected gains. Sixty-four subjects monitored a simulated air traffic control task over a 2 h period for possible conflict situations (their primary task) under either high or low primary taskload conditions. They also monitored for occasional intrusions by light aircraft identifiable on the basis of target shape alone or with colour and/or flashing added as redundant cues. Flashing as a redundant cue was found to be superior to colour in all aspects tested; unlike colour, detection of flashing targets was unaffected by screen location and by changes in primary taskload. Flashing was also least affected by monitoring fatigue. It was concluded that the superiority of flashing over colour in attracting attention to objects in a display must be weighed against its possible potential for distraction. A practical means of accomplishing this in operational situations is through the use of touch sensitive displays to both acknowledge/confirm target location and to deactivate flashing.     

Do visual word segmentation cues improve reading performance in Chinese reading？

Abstract

It is controversial whether providing visual word segmentation cues can improve Chinese reading performance. This study investigated this topic by examining how visual word segmentation cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influence global sentence reading and local word recognition during reading Chinese text in three experiments. The results showed that interword spacing could facilitate local word recognition but could not increase reading speed. In contrast, grey highlighting and red colour could improve neither local word recognition nor global sentence reading performance. Instead, these cues increased the number of fixations and saccades, resulting in slower reading speed. These results suggest that even red colour is not a practically visual cue for Chinese word segmentation and the corresponding mechanisms were discussed.

Practitioner Summary: We studied how visual cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influenced Chinese reading performance. Our data showed that even the red colour was not an efficient cue for Chinese word segmentation. The corresponding mechanisms and future direction were discussed regarding how to improve Chinese reading performance.     

Appropriating an architectural design tool for musical ends

NURBS (non-uniform rational b-spline) modelling has become a ubiquitous tool within architectural design praxis. In this article I examine three projects that utilise NURBS modelling as a means for which a musical system's inherent spatiality is visualised. There are numerous precedents for which architectural form is a derivation of a musical system, or a musical system is proportionally informed by architectonic gesture. I propose in this article three NURBS modelling methodologies: for the spatial analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's sound projection geometries in Pole für 2; for a spatial realisation of John Cage's indeterminate work Variations III; and for the generation of a surface manifold informed by musically derived soundscape data from the Japanese garden Kyu Furukawa Teien. Rather than seeking to translate music into inhabitable architecture, or architectonic form into music, I highlight an approach that produces an interstitial territory between discourses on architecture and music analysis.     

Pitch-Dependent Identification of Musical Instrument Sounds

This paper describes a musical instrument identification method that takes into consideration the pitch dependency of timbres of musical instruments. The difficulty in musical instrument identification resides in the pitch dependency of musical instrument sounds, that is, acoustic features of most musical instruments vary according to the pitch (fundamental frequency, F0). To cope with this difficulty, we propose an F0-dependent multivariate normal distribution, where each element of the mean vector is represented by a function of F0. Our method first extracts 129 features (e.g., the spectral centroid, the gradient of the straight line approximating the power envelope) from a musical instrument sound and then reduces the dimensionality of the feature space into 18 dimension. In the 18-dimensional feature space, it calculates an F0-dependent mean function and an F0-normalized covariance, and finally applies the Bayes decision rule. Experimental results of identifying 6,247 solo tones of 19 musical instruments shows that the proposed method improved the recognition rate from 75.73% to 79.73%. This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), No.15200015, and Informatics Research Center for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure (COE program of MEXT, Japan). Tetsuro Kitahara received the B.S. from Tokyo University of Science in 2002 and the M.S. from Kyoto University in 2004. He is currently a Ph.D. course student at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. Since 2005, he has been a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His research interests include music informatics. He recieved IPSJ 65th National Convention Student Award in 2003, IPSJ 66th National Convention Student Award and TELECOM System Technology Award for Student in 2004, and IPSJ 67th National Convention Best Paper Award for Young Researcher in 2005. He is a student member of IPSJ, IEICE, JSAI, ASJ, and JSMPC. Masataka Goto received his Doctor of Engineering degree in Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering from Waseda University, Japan, in 1998. He then joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL; reorganized as the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in 2001), where he has been engaged as a researcher ever since. He served concurrently as a researcher in Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO), Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) from 2000 to 2003, and an associate professor of the Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies, Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba since 2005. His research interests include music information processing and spoken language processing. Dr. Goto received seventeen awards including the IPSJ Best Paper Award and IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Awards (MUS and SLP) from the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), Awaya Prize for Outstanding Presentation and Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation from the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), Award for Best Presentation from the Japanese Society for Music Perception and Cognition (JSMPC), WISS 2000 Best Paper Award and Best Presentation Award, and Interaction 2003 Best Paper Award. He is a member of the IPSJ, ASJ, JSMPC, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). Hiroshi G. Okuno received the B.A. and Ph.D from the University of Tokyo in 1972 and 1996, respectively. He worked for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, and Tokyo University of Science. He is currently a professor at the Department of Intelligence Technology and Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and a visiting associate professor at the University of Tokyo. He has done research in programming languages, parallel processing, and reasoning mechanism in AI, and he is currently engaged in computational auditory scene analysis, music scene analysis and robot audition. He received the best paper awards from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and the International Society for Applied Intelligence, in 1991 and 2001, respectively. He edited with David Rosenthal “Computational Auditory Scene Analysis” from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1998 and with Taiichi Yuasa “Advanced Lisp Technology” from Taylor and Francis Inc. in 2002. He is a member of IPSJ, JSAI, JSSST, JSCS, ACM, AAAI, ASA, and IEEE.     

Colour tonality inspection using eigenspace features

In industrial quality inspection of colour texture surfaces, such as ceramic tiles or fabrics, it is important to maintain a consistent colour shade or tonality during production. We present a multidimensional histogram method using a novelty detection scheme to inspect the surfaces. The image noise, introduced by the imaging system, is found mainly to affect the chromatic channels. For colour tonality inspection, the difference between images is very subtle and comparison in the noise dominated chromatic channels is error prone. We perform vector-ordered colour smoothing and extract a localised feature vector at each pixel. The resulting histogram represents an encapsulation of local and global information. Principal component analysis (PCA) is performed on this multidimensional feature space of an automatically selected reference image to obtain reliable colour shade features, which results in a reference eigenspace. Then unseen product images are projected onto this eigenspace and compared for tonality defect detection using histogram comparison. The proposed method is compared and evaluated on a data set with groundtruth. Xianghua Xie is currently a Ph.D. student and a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, U.K. Prior to this, he received an M.Sc. degree in advanced computing with commendation from the University of Bristol in 2002 and a B.Sc. degree in environmental engineering from the Tongji University, Shanghai, P.R. China, in 2000. His current research interests are texture analysis, image segmentation, surface inspection, deformable models and historical document analysis. He is a student member of the BMVA, the IEE and the IEEE. Majid Mirmehdi received the B.Sc. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees in computer science in 1985 and 1991 respectively, from the City University, London. He has worked both in industry and in academia. He is currently a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, UK. His research interests include texture analysis, colour image analysis, medical imaging and document recognition. He has over 100 refereed conference and journal publications in these areas. He is an associate editor of the Pattern Analysis and Applications Journal. He is a member of the IEE, IEEE and a member and the Chairman of the British Machine Vision Association.     

Music composition by interaction between human and computer

This paper aims at constructing a music composition system that composes music by the interaction between human and a computer. Even users without special musical knowledge can compose 16-bar musical works with one melody part and some backing parts using this system. The interactive Genetic Algorithm is introduced to music composition so that users’ feeling toward music is reflected in the composed music. One chromosome corresponds to 4-bar musical work information. Users participate in music composition by evaluating composed works after GA operators such as crossover, mutation, virus infection are applied to chromosomes based on the evaluation results. From the experimental results, it is found that the users’ evaluation values become high over the progress of generations. That is, the system can compose 16-bar musical works reflecting users’ feeling. Muneyuki Unehara: He received his M.S. in Engineering in 2002 from Institute of Science and Engineering, University of Tsukuba. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate of Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba. His research interests include the construction of intelligent systems by considering soft computing techniques and human interface. Takehisa Onisawa, Ph.D.: He received Dr.Eng. in Systems Science in 1986 from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Currently, he is a Professor in the Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba. His research interests include applications of soft computing techniques to human centered systems thinking. He is a member of IEEE and IFSA.     

A commentary and correction on the article “Pansharpening by exploiting sharpness of the spatial structure”

This study clarifies the implicit potential deficiency caused by the sparse cardinality parameter k in Rong et al. (2014). In addition, k = β × W × M × N (0.9 ≤ β < 1) is suggested to avert this potential deficiency, where β is a ratio controlling the amount of sparse cardinality, W is the number of multispectral bands and M × N is the size of panchromatic image. With the choice of k suggested in this study, the low rank matrix L and sparse matrix S obtained by Go Decomposition (Zhou and Tao 2011) can be iteratively optimized and solved. Thus, instead of choosing k as W × M × N in Rong et al. (2014), the potential deficiency that L is directly obtained as an analytic solution can be averted.     

A common type of commercially available LED light source allows for colour discrimination performance at a level comparable to halogen lighting

Abstract

As light sources based on light emitting diodes (LED) are increasingly used to replace classic tungsten-based light sources in household lighting applications, possible impairments of colour perception under those light sources due to a different spectral power distribution become a major concern. The Colour Rendering Index (CRI) which is the only measure available to the end user is controversial and does not represent a comprehensive measure of colour perception. Aspects of colour perception disregarded by the CRI such as colour discrimination have to be taken into account as well. Therefore, we evaluated colour discrimination performance under a commercially available phosphor-converted LED light source from a popular brand (OSRAM) in comparison to a classic tungsten-based halogen light source. Colour discrimination performance was not affected by the type of light source, indicating that the phosphor-converted LED light source enables colour discrimination performance comparable to that of halogen lighting despite being associated with a lower CRI.

Practitioner summary: Considering the increasing use of energy efficient light sources, we compared colour discrimination under a common type of phosphor-converted LED and under traditional halogen lighting. Colour discrimination performance was comparable in both lighting conditions, indicating that the phosphor-converted LED can replace halogen lighting without sacrificing colour discrimination for energy efficiency.

Abbreviations: LED: light emitting diode; CRI: colour rendering index; CCT: correlated colour temperature; CIE: commission internationale de l’éclairage; FMHT: Farnsworth-Munsell 100-Hue Test; lm: lumen; lx: lux, lumen/m^2; W: watt; nm: nanometer; K: kelvin     

Formal development of industrial-scale systems in <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">Circus</Emphasis>

Circus is a new notation that may be used to specify both data and behavioural aspects of a system, and has an associated refinement calculus. In this work, we present rules to translate Circus programs to Java programs that use JCSP, a library that implements Communicating Sequential Processes constructs. These rules can be used as a complement to the Circus algebraic refinement technique, or as a guideline for implementation. They are a link between the results on refinement in the context of Circus and a practical programming language in current use. The rules can also be used as the basis for a tool that mechanises the translation. Although a few case studies are already available in the literature, the industrial fire control system, whose refinement and implementation is discussed in this paper, is, as far as we know, the largest case study on the Circus refinement strategy.     

A Shot boundary Detection Technique based on Visual Colour Information

The paper proposes a novel video segmentation system with maiden application of CIEDE2000 colour-difference and mean luminace pattern. CIEDE2000 colour-difference uses Lab colour space which is a stable and efficient colour space. The main advantage of Lab colour space model is that it can approximate all the available colours perceived by our human eye. CIEDE2000 colour difference is used for detecting abrupt transitions in the video. The novel contribution of the paper is the maiden use of the mean luminance pattern, increasing and decreasing patterns of the mean value of frame luminance, for detecting the gradual transition. The approach is validated on standard databases TRECVid 2001 and 2007 test video database. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with recently reported techniques and found to be superior as compared to other techniques. The accuracy achieved with the proposed method on the standard databases is 95.9% for cut transition, 78.6% for gradual transition and 92.1% overall.

     

Neural Networks Based Colour Measuring for Process Monitoring and Control in Multicoloured Newspaper Printing

This paper presents a neural networks based method and a system for colour measurements on printed halftone multicoloured pictures and halftone multi-coloured bars in newspapers. The measured values, called a colour vector, are used by the operator controlling the printing process to make appropriate ink feed adjustments to compensate for colour deviations of the picture being measured from the desired print. By the colour vector concept, we mean the CMY or CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) vector, which lives in the three- or four-dimensional space of printing inks. Two factors contribute to values of the vector components, namely the percentage of the area covered by cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks (tonal values) and ink densities. Values of the colour vector components increase if tonal values or ink densities rise, and vice versa. If some reference values of the colour vector components are set from a desired print, then after an appropriate calibration, the colour vector measured on an actual halftone multicoloured area directly shows how much the operator needs to raise or lower the cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink densities to compensate for colour deviation from the desired print. The 18 months experience of the use of the system in the printing shop witnesses its usefulness through the improved quality of multicoloured pictures, the reduced consumption of inks and, therefore, less severe problems of smearing and printing through.     

The effect of brightness on colour recognition under water

Abstract

Water distorts the colours of objects compared to the situation in air, and it is relevant to enquire how this affects divers' colour recognition. Twelve divers (eight in the laboratory and four in a field experiment) were required to determine the distances at which colours could be correctly identified in different types of water. Changing a target's brightness (keeping hue and saturation constant) significantly changed its recognition distance. In addition, reducing the reflectance of a target having a similar hue to that of the background reduced its recognition distance relatively more than targets with hues offset from that of the background. Consequently, classification by hue name alone was insufficient to allow an unambiguous rank ordering of the relative recognition distances of the different colours. In situ light measurements in the field study permitted the specification of the spectral characteristics of the targets and their visual background. Such data are important if a colour recognition model is to be established for situations involving gross spectral distortion.