The application of a binary division procedure to the classification of forest subcategories using MODIS time-series data during 2000–2010 in China

Forests account for more than 23% of China’s total area. As the most important terrestrial ecosystem, forests have tremendous ecological value. However, it remains difficult to classify forest subcategories at the national scale. In this study, a newly developed binary division procedure was used to categorize forest areas, including their spatiotemporal dynamics, during the period 2000–2010. Time-series images acquired using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), together with auxiliary data on land use, climate zoning, and topography, were utilized. Hierarchical classification and zoning were combined with remote-sensing auto-classification. Based on the forest extent mask, the state-level forest system was divided into four classes and 18 subcategories. The method achieved an acceptable overall accuracy of 73.1%, based on a comparison to the sample points of China’s fourth forest general survey data set. In 2010, the total forest area was 1.755 × 10⁶ km², and the total area of and shrubs was 4.885 × 10⁵ km². The total area of woodland increased by 2536.25 km² during the decade 2000–2010. The shrub subcategories exhibited almost no change during this time period; however, significant changes in forest area occurred in the mountainous region of Northeast China as well as in the hilly regions of Southern China. The main transformations took place in cold-temperate and temperate mountainous deciduous coniferous forest, subtropical deciduous coniferous forest, subtropical evergreen coniferous forest, and temperate and subtropical deciduous broadleaved mixed forests. The binary division procedure proposed herein can be used not only to rapidly classify more forest subcategories and monitor their dynamic changes, but also to improve the classification accuracy compared with global and national land-cover maps.     

Applying eco-visualisations of different interface formats to evoke sustainable behaviours towards household water saving

The shortage of water resources is a global issue. This study attempts to utilise eco-visualisation interface design to affect users’ water-usage behaviour. Three interface proposals were designed in this study: numeric, water droplet (abstract symbol), and swimming fish (animated image). These three different interface formats range from abstract to figurative and from neutral to affective. A total of 93 subjects were divided into three groups and randomly performed designated dishwashing tasks twice. One of the tasks was completed without the assistance of any interface, whereas the other involved applying one of the three interface formats with eco-visualisations. In this study, the Self-Assessment Manikin scales, the System Usability Scale, and the Questionnaires for User Interaction Satisfaction were used to measure the emotional dimensions and perceived usability and to record the differences in water usage volume. The results indicated that the emotional valence evoked by the animated image interface was significantly higher than that by the numeric interface. The effect of the numeric interface formats on the subjects focused on emotional arousal, whereas other interfaces emphasised emotional valence. With the aid of the eco-visualisations of interface design, the evoked emotional response and enhanced usability could help improve sustainable behaviours towards water saving.     

Users' psychological perception and perceived readability of wearable devices for elderly people

As the population of elderly people in society rises, the importance of technology to assist health management is growing with the demographic shift. Wearable personal computing has been the common solution proposed by related projects to fulfil the needs of elderly people. These add-on devices are attached to the users, and result in uneasiness or discomfort while wearing them in public areas. In this study, three common wearing positions – wrist, upper arm, and neck – were investigated in terms of psychological perception and perceived readability. Twenty-four Taiwanese participants in Miaoli area were asked to wear the designed prototypes for a certain time. The participants completed questionnaires and participated in an open-ended interview. Data of psychological perceptions, visibility, and readability about wearable devices were collected. The results evidenced that the personal attributes of gender, smart device user, and requirement for medical care affect the psychological perception and user attitudes. The statistical results indicated significant differences in elderly people's attitudes towards wearable devices attached to different parts of the body. The wrist was the most favourable location to attach a wearable device.     

基于K均值聚类和粒子群优化的多核SVM图像分割

图像分割是图像理解和计算机视觉的重要内容.针对单核SVM在进行图像分割过程中不能兼顾分割精度高和泛化性能好的问题,提出一种基于K均值聚类和优化多核SVM的图像分割算法.该算法首先运用K均值聚类算法自动选取训练样本,然后提取其颜色特征和纹理特征作为训练样本的特征属性,并使用其对构造的多核SVM分割模型进行训练,最后用粒子群优化算法对多核核参数、惩罚因子以及核权重系数联合寻优,使生成的多核SVM具有更好的分割性能.实验结果表明,本文方法在有效提取图像目标细节的同时,获得了更高的分割精度,与基于单核的SVM分割模型相比,具有更强的泛化能力.     

自底向上构建高效BVH的研究

光线追踪中,加速结构对于减少光线与几何体求交的计算量起到了不可或缺的作用,找到一种高效的加速结构仍然是本领域的研究热点之一.传统的加速结构如BVH,都是自顶向下的构建方式,由于其本身的限制,构造出的加速结构往往不是最优的.为了改进自顶向下的缺陷,提出了一种自底向上BVH的构建方式,它使用了BVH和空间划分的混合结构,并引入了一种改进的表面积启发代价函数和多个构建参数来优化最后的构建结果.最后实验表明,此文中提出的方式比传统的BVH与KD-Trees有更好的加速效果,可以实现对前两者5%-10%的提速.最后,文中还给出了一些加速方案来减少构建时间.     

RBC-CC: RBC-Based Cascade Caching Scheme for Content-Centric Networking

With the increasing demand of content dissemination, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has been proposed as a promising architecture for future Internet. In response to the challenges in CCN caching, we develop an online caching scheme (named RBC-CC) exploiting the concept of Routing Betweenness Centrality (RBC) and “prefetching”, aiming at significantly reducing costly inter-ISP traffic and largely reducing content access hops. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed caching scheme can significantly outperform the popular caching approaches in terms of the saving rate of inter-ISP traffic. Besides, RBC-CC performs well in reducing the average access hops and incurs the least cache evictions. Further, we present a thorough analysis regarding the impact of access pattern, cache size, content popularity and population on the caching performance. We then come to the conclusion that our scheme is featured with good stability and scalability as well as its effectiveness.     

Visual topic discovering,tracking and summarization from social media streams

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Nowadays, microblogging has become popular, with hundreds of millions of short messages being posted and shared every minute on a variety of topics in social...     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">υ</Emphasis>-Support vector machine based on discriminant sparse neighborhood preserving embedding

In this paper, we mainly focus on two issues (1) SVM is very sensitive to noise. (2) The solution of SVM does not take into consideration of the intrinsic structure and the discriminant information of the data. To address these two problems, we first propose an integration model to integrate both the local manifold structure and the local discriminant information into ?₁ graph embedding. Then we add the integration model into the objection function of υ-support vector machine. Therefore, a discriminant sparse neighborhood preserving embedding υ-support vector machine (υ-DSNPESVM) method is proposed. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that υ-DSNPESVM is a reasonable maximum margin classifier and can obtain a very lower generalization error upper bound by minimizing the integration model and the upper bound of margin error. Moreover, in the nonlinear case, we construct the kernel sparse representation-based ?₁ graph for υ-DSNPESVM, which is more conducive to improve the classification accuracy than ?₁ graph constructed in the original space. Experimental results on real datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed υ-DSNPESVM method.     

Effects of a radial electric field on the thinning of a slightly viscoelastic liquid jet

In this work, we study numerically the thinning of a perfectly conducting, slightly viscoelastic liquid jet under a radial electric field by using a one-dimensional model. In the presence of the electric field, the viscoelastic jet develops into a stable beads-on-a-string structure with a uniform thickness filament as in the non-electrified case, but the \( 1/3De \) (De: the Deborah number) exponential law of filament thinning and polymer stress growth holds no more. The electric field decelerates the thinning of the jet and induces periodic oscillations of the flow properties. The balance between the surface tension, viscoelastic stress and electrostatic force is absent in the filament, and as a result, the extensional flow there becomes unsteady.     

Optimized design of sandwich panels for integral thermal protection systems

This paper proposes a new ITPS panel with special corrugated-core webs which are designed with cutouts for weight saving. The structural design problem was formulated with mass per unit area of the ITPS as the objective function and some functional requirements as constraints. We developed the optimizer fulfilling both thermal and structural functions for minimal areal density. The optimization problem was solved by interpolating the residual error of response surface approximation (RSA) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) to establish the improved RSA (IRSA). The 400 preliminary design points were obtained using Latin Hypercube Sampling method. The quadratic polynomial RSA of the ITPS sandwich panel performance was generated by the least squares method (LSM) based on finite element results and IRSA was used to optimize the constraints. Transient heat transfer, stress and buckling analyses were conducted using finite element method (FEM). Finally, a new ITPS panel with optimal dimensions was obtained. The optimization results show that the areal density of the new ITPS panel decreases by 26.27 % compared with the previous research, which proves the potential of this new design optimization method for the future spacecraft vehicles.