3-Dimensional Building Details from Aerial Photography for Internet Maps

This paper introduces the automated characterization of real estate (real property) for Internet mapping. It proposes a processing framework to achieve this task from vertical aerial photography and associated property information. A demonstration of the feasibility of an automated solution builds on test data from the Austrian City of Graz. Information is extracted from vertical aerial photography and various data products derived from that photography in the form of a true orthophoto, a dense digital surface model and digital terrain model, and a classification of land cover. Maps of cadastral property boundaries aid in defining real properties. Our goal is to develop a table for each property with descriptive numbers about the buildings, their dimensions, number of floors, number of windows, roof shapes, impervious surfaces, garages, sheds, vegetation, presence of a basement floor, and other descriptors of interest for each and every property of a city. From aerial sources, at a pixel size of 10 cm, we show that we have obtained positional accuracies in the range of a single pixel, an accuracy of areas in the 10% range, floor counts at an accuracy of 93% and window counts at 86% accuracy. We also introduce 3D point clouds of facades and their creation from vertical aerial photography, and how these point clouds can support the definition of complex facades

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

A Comprehensive Review on Computer Vision Analysis of Aerial Data

With the emergence of new technologies in the field of airborne platforms and imaging sensors, aerial data analysis is becoming very popular, capitalizing on its advantages over land data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the computer vision tasks within the domain of aerial data analysis. While addressing fundamental aspects such as object detection and tracking, the primary focus is on pivotal tasks like change detection, object segmentation, and scene-level analysis. The paper provides the comparison of various hyper parameters employed across diverse architectures and tasks. A substantial section is dedicated to an in-depth discussion on libraries, their categorization, and their relevance to different domain expertise. The paper encompasses aerial datasets, the architectural nuances adopted, and the evaluation metrics associated with all the tasks in aerial data analysis. Applications of computer vision tasks in aerial data across different domains are explored, with case studies providing further insights. The paper thoroughly examines the challenges inherent in aerial data analysis, offering practical solutions. Additionally, unresolved issues of significance are identified, paving the way for future research directions in the field of aerial data analysis.Comment: 112 page

MIDGARD: A Simulation Platform for Autonomous Navigation in Unstructured Environments

We present MIDGARD, an open-source simulation platform for autonomous robot navigation in outdoor unstructured environments. MIDGARD is designed to enable the training of autonomous agents (e.g., unmanned ground vehicles) in photorealistic 3D environments, and to support the generalization skills of learning-based agents through the variability in training scenarios. MIDGARD's main features include a configurable, extensible, and difficulty-driven procedural landscape generation pipeline, with fast and photorealistic scene rendering based on Unreal Engine. Additionally, MIDGARD has built-in support for OpenAI Gym, a programming interface for feature extension (e.g., integrating new types of sensors, customizing exposing internal simulation variables), and a variety of simulated agent sensors (e.g., RGB, depth and instance/semantic segmentation). We evaluate MIDGARD's capabilities as a benchmarking tool for robot navigation utilizing a set of state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. The results demonstrate MIDGARD's suitability as a simulation and training environment, as well as the effectiveness of our procedural generation approach in controlling scene difficulty, which directly reflects on accuracy metrics. MIDGARD build, source code and documentation are available at https://midgardsim.org/

Sensing Mountains

Sensing mountains by close-range and remote techniques is a challenging task. The 4th edition of the international Innsbruck Summer School of Alpine Research 2022 – Close-range Sensing Techniques in Alpine Terrain brings together early career and experienced scientists from technical-, geo- and environmental-related research fields. The interdisciplinary setting of the summer school creates a creative space for exchanging and learning new concepts and solutions for mapping, monitoring and quantifying mountain environments under ongoing conditions of change

Digital modeling of the impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake

Toys have played a role in the development of 3D skills for architects. As a continuation of this, games, a subgenre of which are city building games, the father of all is SimCity, a variant of construction management games, underlay a socio-economic model. Outgoing from a general view of the role of toys and games in building the skills of architects, we focus on the modelling of the impact of earthquakes on urban areas. The particular case considered is Lisbon 1755, set into the context of related developments such as l'Aquila 2009 and Bucharest 1977. We examined the 3D modelling of the city, which can be the base for computer games, namely the GIS based, Google Earth and Second Life. For all these modells we filled forms which are provided in the annexes, to see the usability and potential improvements, which will be considered in the model we propose. The later builds a game with a socio-economic component, but both later ones have the social component of crowd sourcing participation. The Second Life concept can be extended with narratives of chance like in board games, to realise the immersion like in a novel in the historic time depicted, organising for example virtual events in the public space framework modelled. Different Levels of Detail are identified as necessary in order to on one side identify the landmarks of the image of the city in the perception of inhabitants and tourists and on the other hand to model populations of buildings for future economic studies, based on a structural mechanics instead of statistical approach. Outgoing from this analysis we propose an own concept to model the impact of the 1755 earthquake on Lisbon. We based our concept on the analysis of the space and time aspects in the memory of the pre-disaster city, and considered 72 landmark buildings which can be symbolically modeled as spaces, based on a 2D to 3D concept. Depending on where they were situated, these have been affected by the earthquake or not. We provide besides the overview of the literature on games for architecture on urbanism purposes also this one on memory. This includes on its side a game, for lessons learned in the identification of the landmarks of the city. Apart of the game, there is a guided tour with timeline and the 3D model in itself. Codes are provided. For the analysis we used different views of the city: eye-level, silhouette (from the river) and aerial. This can be the basis of a future augmented reality application including the 3D model and the photos/ engravings of the time. The socio-economic component will be based on the modeling of material resources necessary to retrofit or reconstruct, for the detailedly considered „pombalino” buildings. But first of all identifying the urban morphology through 3D modeling is serving as a basis for master planning, especially the strategic planning of the minimal urban structure, in both preventive pre-earthquake intervention and post-earthquake reconstruction, as aimed for in the „Lisbon in motion” workshop and planned related ones