31,447 research outputs found
Automated identification of river hydromorphological features using UAV high resolution aerial imagery
European legislation is driving the development of methods for river ecosystem protection in light of concerns over water quality and ecology. Key to their success is the accurate and rapid characterisation of physical features (i.e., hydromorphology) along the river. Image pattern recognition techniques have been successfully used for this purpose. The reliability of the methodology depends on both the quality of the aerial imagery and the pattern recognition technique used. Recent studies have proved the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to increase the quality of the imagery by capturing high resolution photography. Similarly, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been shown to be a high precision tool for automated recognition of environmental patterns. This paper presents a UAV based framework for the identification of hydromorphological features from high resolution RGB aerial imagery using a novel classification technique based on ANNs. The framework is developed for a 1.4 km river reach along the river Dee in Wales, United Kingdom. For this purpose, a Falcon 8 octocopter was used to gather 2.5 cm resolution imagery. The results show that the accuracy of the framework is above 81%, performing particularly well at recognising vegetation. These results leverage the use of UAVs for environmental policy implementation and demonstrate the potential of ANNs and RGB imagery for high precision river monitoring and river management
Accelerating Cooperative Planning for Automated Vehicles with Learned Heuristics and Monte Carlo Tree Search
Efficient driving in urban traffic scenarios requires foresight. The
observation of other traffic participants and the inference of their possible
next actions depending on the own action is considered cooperative prediction
and planning. Humans are well equipped with the capability to predict the
actions of multiple interacting traffic participants and plan accordingly,
without the need to directly communicate with others. Prior work has shown that
it is possible to achieve effective cooperative planning without the need for
explicit communication. However, the search space for cooperative plans is so
large that most of the computational budget is spent on exploring the search
space in unpromising regions that are far away from the solution. To accelerate
the planning process, we combined learned heuristics with a cooperative
planning method to guide the search towards regions with promising actions,
yielding better solutions at lower computational costs
iMapD: intrinsic Map Dynamics exploration for uncharted effective free energy landscapes
We describe and implement iMapD, a computer-assisted approach for
accelerating the exploration of uncharted effective Free Energy Surfaces (FES),
and more generally for the extraction of coarse-grained, macroscopic
information from atomistic or stochastic (here Molecular Dynamics, MD)
simulations. The approach functionally links the MD simulator with nonlinear
manifold learning techniques. The added value comes from biasing the simulator
towards new, unexplored phase space regions by exploiting the smoothness of the
(gradually, as the exploration progresses) revealed intrinsic low-dimensional
geometry of the FES
Quantifying the effect of aerial imagery resolution in automated hydromorphological river characterisation
Existing regulatory frameworks aiming to improve the quality of rivers place hydromorphology as a key factor in the assessment of hydrology, morphology and river continuity. The majority of available methods for hydromorphological characterisation rely on the identification of homogeneous areas (i.e., features) of flow, vegetation and substrate. For that purpose, aerial imagery is used to identify existing features through either visual observation or automated classification techniques. There is evidence to believe that the success in feature identification relies on the resolution of the imagery used. However, little effort has yet been made to quantify the uncertainty in feature identification associated with the resolution of the aerial imagery. This paper contributes to address this gap in knowledge by contrasting results in automated hydromorphological feature identification from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) aerial imagery captured at three resolutions (2.5 cm, 5 cm and 10 cm) along a 1.4 km river reach. The results show that resolution plays a key role in the accuracy and variety of features identified, with larger identification errors observed for riffles and side bars. This in turn has an impact on the ecological characterisation of the river reach. The research shows that UAV technology could be essential for unbiased hydromorphological assessment
Trying to break new ground in aerial archaeology
Aerial reconnaissance continues to be a vital tool for landscape-oriented archaeological research. Although a variety of remote sensing platforms operate within the earth’s atmosphere, the majority of aerial archaeological information is still derived from oblique photographs collected during observer-directed reconnaissance flights, a prospection approach which has dominated archaeological aerial survey for the past century. The resulting highly biased imagery is generally catalogued in sub-optimal (spatial) databases, if at all, after which a small selection of images is orthorectified and interpreted. For decades, this has been the standard approach. Although many innovations, including digital cameras, inertial units, photogrammetry and computer vision algorithms, geographic(al) information systems and computing power have emerged, their potential has not yet been fully exploited in order to re-invent and highly optimise this crucial branch of landscape archaeology. The authors argue that a fundamental change is needed to transform the way aerial archaeologists approach data acquisition and image processing. By addressing the very core concepts of geographically biased aerial archaeological photographs and proposing new imaging technologies, data handling methods and processing procedures, this paper gives a personal opinion on how the methodological components of aerial archaeology, and specifically aerial archaeological photography, should evolve during the next decade if developing a more reliable record of our past is to be our central aim. In this paper, a possible practical solution is illustrated by outlining a turnkey aerial prospection system for total coverage survey together with a semi-automated back-end pipeline that takes care of photograph correction and image enhancement as well as the management and interpretative mapping of the resulting data products. In this way, the proposed system addresses one of many bias issues in archaeological research: the bias we impart to the visual record as a result of selective coverage. While the total coverage approach outlined here may not altogether eliminate survey bias, it can vastly increase the amount of useful information captured during a single reconnaissance flight while mitigating the discriminating effects of observer-based, on-the-fly target selection. Furthermore, the information contained in this paper should make it clear that with current technology it is feasible to do so. This can radically alter the basis for aerial prospection and move landscape archaeology forward, beyond the inherently biased patterns that are currently created by airborne archaeological prospection
Classification of red blood cell shapes in flow using outlier tolerant machine learning
The manual evaluation, classification and counting of biological objects
demands for an enormous expenditure of time and subjective human input may be a
source of error. Investigating the shape of red blood cells (RBCs) in
microcapillary Poiseuille flow, we overcome this drawback by introducing a
convolutional neural regression network for an automatic, outlier tolerant
shape classification. From our experiments we expect two stable geometries: the
so-called `slipper' and `croissant' shapes depending on the prevailing flow
conditions and the cell-intrinsic parameters. Whereas croissants mostly occur
at low shear rates, slippers evolve at higher flow velocities. With our method,
we are able to find the transition point between both `phases' of stable shapes
which is of high interest to ensuing theoretical studies and numerical
simulations. Using statistically based thresholds, from our data, we obtain
so-called phase diagrams which are compared to manual evaluations.
Prospectively, our concept allows us to perform objective analyses of
measurements for a variety of flow conditions and to receive comparable
results. Moreover, the proposed procedure enables unbiased studies on the
influence of drugs on flow properties of single RBCs and the resulting
macroscopic change of the flow behavior of whole blood.Comment: 15 pages, published in PLoS Comput Biol, open acces
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