Environmental monitoring of North Merritt Island

The environmental impact of the space shuttle operation on North Merritt Island was studied mainly by means of color infrared photos and field visits. An attempt was also made to generate character maps of the Island using LANDSAT data with a view to decreasing the cost of monitoring and making the process more flexible in terms of rapid estimation of the extent of selected ground features. It seems possible that the IMAGE-100 output can be improved by using it in conjunction with software systems which are used for generating character maps. All the methods for generating maps show six main plant associations on North Merritt Island. It was shown that the six associations are related by ecological succession, merge into their neighbors in terms of component species and can be observed for changes in terms of component species

A deep XMM-Newton X-ray observation of the Chamaeleon I dark cloud

Methods. The northern-eastern fringe of the Chameleon I dark cloud was observed with XMM-Newton, revisiting a region observed with ROSAT 15 years ago. Centered on the extended X-ray source CHXR49 we are able to resolve it into three major contributing components and to analyse their spectral properties. Furthermore, the deep exposure allows not only the detection of numerous, previously unknown X-ray sources, but also the investigation of variability and the study of the X-ray properties for the brighter targets in the field. We use EPIC spectra, to determine X-ray brightness, coronal temperatures and emission measures for these sources, compare the properties of classical and weak-line T Tauri stars and make a comparison with results from the ROSAT observation. Results. X-ray properties of T Tauri stars in Cha I are presented. The XMM-Newton images resolve some previously blended X-ray sources, confirm several possible ones and detect many new X-ray targets, resulting in the most comprehensive list with 71 X-ray sources in the northern Cha I dark cloud. The analysis of medium resolution spectra shows an overlapping distribution of spectral properties for classical and weak-line T Tauri stars, with the X-ray brighter stars having hotter coronae and a higher L_X/L_bol ratio. X-ray luminosity correlates with bolometric luminosity, whereas the L_X/L_bol ratio is slightly lower for the classical T Tauri stars. Large flares as well as a low iron and a high neon abundance are found in both types of T Tauri stars. Abundance pattern, plasma temperatures and emission measure distributions during quiescent phases are attributed toa high level of magnetic activity as the dominant source of their X-ray emission.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, accepted by A&

Using EEG and NIRS for brain-computer interface and cognitive performance measures: a pilot study

This study addresses two important problem statements, namely, selection of training datasets for online Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) classifier training and determination of participant concentration levels during an experiment. The work also attempted a pilot study to integrate electroencephalograms (EEGs) and Near Infra Red Spectroscopy (NIRS) for possible applications such as the BCI and for measuring cognitive levels. Two experiments are presented, the first being a mathematical task interleaved with rest states using NIRS only. In the next, integration of the EEG-NIRS with reference to P300-based BCI systems as well as the experimental conditions designed to elicit the concentration levels (denoted as ON and OFF states here) during the paradigm, are presented. The first experiment indicates that NIRS can be used to differentiate a concentrated (i.e., mental activity) level from the rest. However, the second experiment reveals statistically significant results using the EEG only. We present details about the equipment used, the participants as well as the signal processing and machine learning techniques implemented to analyse the EEG and NIRS data. After discussing the results, we conclude by describing the research scope as well as the possible pitfalls in this work from a NIRS viewpoint, which presents an opportunity for future research exploration for BCI and cognitive performance measures

The French Atlantic littoral and the Massif Armoricain, part 1

The author has identified the following significant results. For interpretation of Isle of Jersey imagery, two types of taxons were defined according to their variability in time. On the whole, taxons with a similar spectral signature were opposed to those with strongly varying spectral signature. The taxon types were low diachronic variations and strong diachronic variation. Imagery interpretation was restricted to the landward part of the Fromentine area, including the sand beaches which were often difficult to spectrally separate from the barren coastal dunes in the southern part of Noirmoutier Island as well as along the Breton marsh. From 1972 to 1976, sandbanks reduced in area. Two high river discharge images showed over a two year period an identical outline for the Bilho bank to seaward, whereas upstream, the bank has receeded in the same time to a line joining Paimboeuf to Montoir. The Brillantes bank has receeded at both ends, partly due to dredging operations in the access channel to Donges harbor

Minutiae Based Thermal Human Face Recognition using Label Connected Component Algorithm

In this paper, a thermal infra red face recognition system for human identification and verification using blood perfusion data and back propagation feed forward neural network is proposed. The system consists of three steps. At the very first step face region is cropped from the colour 24-bit input images. Secondly face features are extracted from the croped region, which will be taken as the input of the back propagation feed forward neural network in the third step and classification and recognition is carried out. The proposed approaches are tested on a number of human thermal infra red face images created at our own laboratory. Experimental results reveal the higher degree performanceComment: 7 pages, Conference. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1309.1000, arXiv:1309.0999, arXiv:1309.100

SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis

Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes, under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations, numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Enhancement and evaluation of Skylab photography for potential land use inventories, part 1

The author has identified the following significant results. Three sites were evaluated for land use inventory: Finger Lakes - Tompkins County, Lower Hudson Valley - Newburgh, and Suffolk County - Long Island. Special photo enhancement processes were developed to standardize the density range and contrast among S190A negatives. Enhanced black and white enlargements were converted to color by contact printing onto diazo film. A color prediction model related the density values on each spectral band for each category of land use to the spectral properties of the various diazo dyes. The S190A multispectral system proved to be almost as effective as the S190B high resolution camera for inventorying land use. Aggregate error for Level 1 averaged about 12% while Level 2 aggregate error averaged about 25%. The S190A system proved to be much superior to LANDSAT in inventorying land use, primarily because of increased resolution