Understanding Behavioral Responses of Wildlife to Traffic to Improve Mitigation Planning

Creating and maintaining sustainable transportation systems depends in part on understanding and mitigating ecological impacts. Wildlife crossing structures (WCS) are often used to mitigate impacts on wildlife populations. WCS and existing structures may provide passage for multiple species, depending on their sensitivity to traffic disturbance and perception of the roadway. In a previous project, the research team found that traffic conditions and traffic noise could reduce WCS effectiveness in facilitating passage of diverse and sensitive species. In the current project, they expanded the geographic scope to 26 sites throughout California, including detailed measurements of vehicle noise and lighting impacts on wildlife use of structures. They investigated individual animal behavior as the animals approached structures as a possible mechanism for reducing species diversity due to traffic disturbance. In order to inform future WCS planning, placement and construction, the team studied traffic noise and light impacts on wildlife in the vicinity of the proposed Liberty Canyon wildlife over-crossing (over US 101), the first and largest of its kind in California. They improved a preliminary statistical model of the effects of traffic on WCS use of existing structures. The authors recommend strategies for transportation agencies to use in developing and modifying WCS to improve wildlife passage.View the NCST Project Webpag

Electron mean free path from angle-dependent photoelectron spectroscopy of aerosol particles

We propose angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy of aerosol particles as an alternative way to determine the electron mean free path of low energy electrons in solid and liquid materials. The mean free path is obtained from fits of simulated photoemission images to experimental ones over a broad range of different aerosol particle sizes. The principal advantage of the aerosol approach is twofold. Firstly, aerosol photoemission studies can be performed for many different materials, including liquids. Secondly, the size-dependent anisotropy of the photoelectrons can be exploited in addition to size-dependent changes in their kinetic energy. These finite size effects depend in different ways on the mean free path and thus provide more information on the mean free path than corresponding liquid jet, thin film, or bulk data. The present contribution is a proof of principle employing a simple model for the photoemission of electrons and preliminary experimental data for potassium chloride aerosol particles

Accurate video object tracking using a region-based particle filter

Usually, in particle filters applied to video tracking, a simple geometrical shape, typically an ellipse, is used in order to bound the object being tracked. Although it is a good tracker, it tends to a bad object representation, as most of the world objects are not simple geometrical shapes. A better way to represent the object is by using a region-based approach, such as the Region Based Particle Filter (RBPF). This method exploits a hierarchical region based representation associated with images to tackle both problems at the same time: tracking and video object segmentation. By means of RBPF the object segmentation is resolved with high accuracy, but new problems arise. The object representation is now based on image partitions instead of pixels. This means that the amount of possible combinations has now decreased, which is computationally good, but an error on the regions taken for the object representation leads to a higher estimation error than methods working at pixel level. On the other hand, if the level of regions detail in the partition is high, the estimation of the object turns to be very noisy, making it hard to accurately propagate the object segmentation. In this thesis we present new tools to the existing RBPF. These tools are focused on increasing the RBPF performance by means of guiding the particles towards a good solution while maintaining a particle filter approach. The concept of hierarchical flow is presented and exploited, a Bayesian estimation is used in order to assign probabilities of being object or background to each region, and the reduction, in an intelligent way, of the solution space , to increase the RBPF robustness while reducing computational effort. Also changes on the already proposed co-clustering in the RBPF approach are proposed. Finally, we present results on the recently presented DAVIS database. This database comprises 50 High Definition video sequences representing several challenging situations. By using this dataset, we compare the RBPF with other state-ofthe- art methods

Sensitive Absorption Imaging of Single Atoms in Front of a Mirror

In this paper we show that the sensitivity of absorption imaging of ultracold atoms can be significantly improved by imaging in a standing-wave configuration. We present simulations of single-atom absorption imaging both for a travelling-wave and a standing-wave imaging setup, based on a scattering approach to calculate the optical density of a single atom. We find that the optical density of a single atom is determined only by the numerical aperture of the imaging system. We determine optimum imaging parameters, taking all relevant sources of noise into account. For reflective imaging we find an improvement of 1.7 in the maximum signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved. This is particularly useful for imaging in the vicinity of an atom chip, where a reflective surface is naturally present