15,498 research outputs found
Estimating snow cover from publicly available images
In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous
regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We
argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated
photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as
additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and
airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and
processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific
challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks,
filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying
illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index,
which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of
visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a
manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area
estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show
that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover
index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
Multi-Source Spatial Entity Linkage
Besides the traditional cartographic data sources, spatial information can
also be derived from location-based sources. However, even though different
location-based sources refer to the same physical world, each one has only
partial coverage of the spatial entities, describe them with different
attributes, and sometimes provide contradicting information. Hence, we
introduce the spatial entity linkage problem, which finds which pairs of
spatial entities belong to the same physical spatial entity. Our proposed
solution (QuadSky) starts with a time-efficient spatial blocking technique
(QuadFlex), compares pairwise the spatial entities in the same block, ranks the
pairs using Pareto optimality with the SkyRank algorithm, and finally,
classifies the pairs with our novel SkyEx-* family of algorithms that yield
0.85 precision and 0.85 recall for a manually labeled dataset of 1,500 pairs
and 0.87 precision and 0.6 recall for a semi-manually labeled dataset of
777,452 pairs. Moreover, we provide a theoretical guarantee and formalize the
SkyEx-FES algorithm that explores only 27% of the skylines without any loss in
F-measure. Furthermore, our fully unsupervised algorithm SkyEx-D approximates
the optimal result with an F-measure loss of just 0.01. Finally, QuadSky
provides the best trade-off between precision and recall, and the best
F-measure compared to the existing baselines and clustering techniques, and
approximates the results of supervised learning solutions
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