Using network centrality measures to manage landscape connectivity

We use a graph-theoretical landscape modeling approach to investigate how to identify central patches in the landscape as well as how these central patches influence (1) organism movement within the local neighborhood, and (2) the dispersal of organisms beyond the local neighborhood. Organism movements were theoretically estimated based on the spatial configuration of the habitat patches in the studied landscape. We find that centrality depends on the way the graph-theoretical model of habitat patches is constructed, although even the simplest network representation, not taking strength and directionality of potential organisms flows into account, still provides a coarse-grained assessment of the most important patches according to their contribution to landscape connectivity. Moreover, we identify (at least) two general classes of centrality. One accounts for the local flow of organisms in the neighborhood of a patch and the other for the ability to maintain connectivity beyond the scale of the local neighborhood. Finally, we study how habitat patches with high scores on different network centrality measures are distributed in a fragmented agricultural landscape in Madagascar. Results show that patches with high degree-, and betweenness centrality are widely spread, while patches with high subgraph- and closeness centrality are clumped together in dense clusters. This finding may enable multi-species analyses of single-species network models

The speed of range shifts in fragmented landscapes

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Generative Image Modeling Using Spatial LSTMs

Modeling the distribution of natural images is challenging, partly because of strong statistical dependencies which can extend over hundreds of pixels. Recurrent neural networks have been successful in capturing long-range dependencies in a number of problems but only recently have found their way into generative image models. We here introduce a recurrent image model based on multi-dimensional long short-term memory units which are particularly suited for image modeling due to their spatial structure. Our model scales to images of arbitrary size and its likelihood is computationally tractable. We find that it outperforms the state of the art in quantitative comparisons on several image datasets and produces promising results when used for texture synthesis and inpainting

Total Variation Regularized Tensor RPCA for Background Subtraction from Compressive Measurements

Background subtraction has been a fundamental and widely studied task in video analysis, with a wide range of applications in video surveillance, teleconferencing and 3D modeling. Recently, motivated by compressive imaging, background subtraction from compressive measurements (BSCM) is becoming an active research task in video surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel tensor-based robust PCA (TenRPCA) approach for BSCM by decomposing video frames into backgrounds with spatial-temporal correlations and foregrounds with spatio-temporal continuity in a tensor framework. In this approach, we use 3D total variation (TV) to enhance the spatio-temporal continuity of foregrounds, and Tucker decomposition to model the spatio-temporal correlations of video background. Based on this idea, we design a basic tensor RPCA model over the video frames, dubbed as the holistic TenRPCA model (H-TenRPCA). To characterize the correlations among the groups of similar 3D patches of video background, we further design a patch-group-based tensor RPCA model (PG-TenRPCA) by joint tensor Tucker decompositions of 3D patch groups for modeling the video background. Efficient algorithms using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) are developed to solve the proposed models. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world videos demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approaches over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE TI