6,888 research outputs found
The German Bight (North Sea) is a nursery area for both locally and externally produced sprat juveniles
To better understand the role of the German Bight (GB) as a nursery area for juvenile North Sea sprat Sprattus sprattus we sought to determine whether the area may receive only locally or also externally produced offspring. We sampled juveniles during 3 trawl surveys in the GB in August, September, and October 2004 and applied otolith microstructure analysis in order to reconstruct their distributions of the day-of-first-increment-formation (dif). These were contrasted with spatial and seasonal patterns of sprat egg abundance in the GB and its adjacent areas, observed during 6 monthly plankton surveys. It was found that the majority of juveniles originated mainly from April/May 2004, coinciding with high spawning activity west of the GB, whereas spawning and larval production inside the GB peaked notably later, in May/June. This indicated that a large proportion of juveniles was produced outside the GB and transported subsequently into it through passive and/or active migration. Shifts to later mean difs from one survey to the next and length distributions indicative of the simultaneous presence of multiple cohorts, supported the notion that the GB is a complex retention and nursery area for sprat offspring from different North Sea spawning grounds and times. Later born juveniles had significantly faster initial growth rates than earlier born conspecifics, which was likely temperature-mediated, given the strong correlation between back-calculated growth histories and sea surface temperature as a proxy for thermal histories of juveniles (r(2) = 0.52). (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Tomographic Study of Internal Erosion of Particle Flows in Porous Media
In particle-laden flows through porous media, porosity and permeability are
significantly affected by the deposition and erosion of particles. Experiments
show that the permeability evolution of a porous medium with respect to a
particle suspension is not smooth, but rather exhibits significant jumps
followed by longer periods of continuous permeability decrease. Their origin
seems to be related to internal flow path reorganization by avalanches of
deposited material due to erosion inside the porous medium. We apply neutron
tomography to resolve the spatio-temporal evolution of the pore space during
clogging and unclogging to prove the hypothesis of flow path reorganization
behind the permeability jumps. This mechanistic understanding of clogging
phenomena is relevant for a number of applications from oil production to
filters or suffosion as the mechanisms behind sinkhole formation.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure
MonoPerfCap: Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video
We present the first marker-less approach for temporally coherent 3D
performance capture of a human with general clothing from monocular video. Our
approach reconstructs articulated human skeleton motion as well as medium-scale
non-rigid surface deformations in general scenes. Human performance capture is
a challenging problem due to the large range of articulation, potentially fast
motion, and considerable non-rigid deformations, even from multi-view data.
Reconstruction from monocular video alone is drastically more challenging,
since strong occlusions and the inherent depth ambiguity lead to a highly
ill-posed reconstruction problem. We tackle these challenges by a novel
approach that employs sparse 2D and 3D human pose detections from a
convolutional neural network using a batch-based pose estimation strategy.
Joint recovery of per-batch motion allows to resolve the ambiguities of the
monocular reconstruction problem based on a low dimensional trajectory
subspace. In addition, we propose refinement of the surface geometry based on
fully automatically extracted silhouettes to enable medium-scale non-rigid
alignment. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance capture results that
enable exciting applications such as video editing and free viewpoint video,
previously infeasible from monocular video. Our qualitative and quantitative
evaluation demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms previous
monocular methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and scene complexity that
can be handled.Comment: Accepted to ACM TOG 2018, to be presented on SIGGRAPH 201
- …