Classification of urban areas from GeoEye-1 imagery through texture features based on Histograms of Equivalent Patterns

A family of 26 non-parametric texture descriptors based on Histograms of Equivalent Patterns (HEP) has been tested, many of them for the first time in remote sensing applications, to improve urban classification through object-based image analysis of GeoEye-1 imagery. These HEP descriptors have been compared to the widely known texture measures derived from the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). All the five finally selected HEP descriptors (Local Binary Patterns, Improved Local Binary Patterns, Binary Gradient Contours and two different combinations of Completed Local Binary Patterns) performed faster in terms of execution time and yielded significantly better accuracy figures than GLCM features. Moreover, the HEP texture descriptors provided additional information to the basic spectral features from the GeoEye-1's bands (R, G, B, NIR, PAN) significantly improving overall accuracy values by around 3%. Conversely, and in statistic terms, strategies involving GLCM texture derivatives did not improve the classification accuracy achieved from only the spectral information. Lastly, both approaches (HEP and GLCM) showed similar behavior with regard to the training set size applied

Control of tumor markers using nanotechnology

II Encuentro sobre nanociencia y nanotecnología de investigadores y tecnólogos de la Universidad de Córdoba. NANOUC

1,3-Dien-5-ynes: Versatile Building Blocks for the Synthesis of Carbo- and Heterocycles

1,3-Dien-5-ynes have been extensively used as starting materials for the synthesis of a wide number of different carbo- and heterocycles. The aim of this review is to give an overview of their utility in organic synthesis, highlighting the variety of compounds that can be directly accessed from single reactions over these systems. Thus, cycloaromatization processes are initially commented, followed by reactions directed toward the syntheses of five-membered rings, other carbocycles and, finally, heterocycles. The diverse methodologies that have been developed for the synthesis of each of these types of compounds from 1,3-dien-5-ynes are presented, emphasizing the influence of the reaction conditions and the use of additional reagents in the outcome of the transformations.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) and FEDER (CTQ2013-41336-P, CTQ2013- 48937-C2-1-P, and CTQ2014-52488-R), Universidad de Alcalá (CCG2015/EXP-003) and Junta de Castilla y León (BU237U13

The structural and electronic properties of nanostructured Ce1–x–yZrxTbyO2 ternary oxides: Unusual concentration of Tb3+ and metal_oxygen_metal interactions

10 pages, 12 figures, 1 table.Ceria-based ternary oxides are widely used in many areas of chemistry, physics, and materials science. Synchrotron-based time-resolved x-ray diffraction, x-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES), Raman spectroscopy, and density-functional calculations were used to study the structural and electronic properties of Ce–Zr–Tb oxide nanoparticles. The nanoparticles were synthesized following a novel microemulsion method and had sizes in the range of 4–7 nm. The Ce1–x–yZrxTbyO2 ternary systems exhibit a complex behavior that cannot be predicted as a simple extrapolation of the properties of Ce1–xZrxO2, Ce1–xTbxO2, or the individual oxides (CeO2, ZrO2, and TbO2). The doping of ceria with Zr and Tb induces a decrease in the unit cell, but there are large positive deviations with respect to the cell parameters predicted by Vegard's rule for ideal solid solutions. The presence of Zr and Tb generates strain in the ceria lattice through the creation of crystal imperfections and O vacancies. The O K-edge and Tb LIII-edge XANES spectra for the Ce1–x–yZrxTbyO2 nanoparticles point to the existence of distinctive electronic properties. In Ce1–x–yZrxTbyO2 there is an unexpected high concentration of Tb3+, which is not seen in TbO2 or Ce1–xTbxO2 and enhances the chemical reactivity of the ternary oxide. Tb_O_Zr interactions produce a stabilization of the Tb(4f,5d) states that is responsible for the high concentration of Tb3+ cations. The behavior of Ce1–x–yZrxTbyO2 illustrates how important can be metal_oxygen_metal interactions for determining the structural, electronic, and chemical properties of a ternary oxide.The research carried out at the Chemistry Department of Brookhaven National Laboratory was financed through Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 with the US Department of Energy (Division of Chemical Sciences). The NSLS is supported by the Divisions of Materials and Chemical Sciences of DOE. Work at the “Instituto de Catálisis y Petroleoquímica (CSIC)” was done with financial support from CICYT (Project No. MAT2000-1467).Peer reviewe

The bipolar outflow and disk of the brown dwarf ISO217

We show that the very young brown dwarf candidate ISO217 (M6.25) is driving an intrinsically asymmetric bipolar outflow with a stronger and slightly faster red-shifted component based on spectro-astrometry of forbidden [SII] emission lines observed in UVES/VLT spectra taken in 2009. ISO217 is only one of a handful of brown dwarfs and VLMS (M5-M8) for which an outflow has been detected and that show that the T Tauri phase continues at the substellar limit. We measure a spatial extension of the outflow of +/-190mas (+/-30AU) and velocities of +/-40-50kms/s. We show that the velocity asymmetry between both lobes is variable on timescales of a few years and that the strong asymmetry of a factor of 2 found in 2007 might be smaller than originally anticipated when using a more realistic stellar rest-velocity. We also detect forbidden [FeII]7155 emission, for which we propose as potential origin the hot inner regions of the outflow. To understand the ISO217 system, we determine the disk properties based on radiative transfer modeling of the SED. This disk model agrees very well with Herschel/PACS data at 70mu. We find that the disk is flared and intermediately inclined (~45deg). The total disk mass (4e-6 Msun) is small compared to the accretion and outflow rate of ISO217 (~1e-10 Msun/yr). We propose that this discrepancy can be explained by either a higher disk mass than inferred from the model (strong undetected grain growth) and/or by an on average lower accretion and outflow rate than the determined values. We show that a disk inclination significantly exceeding 45deg, as suggested from Halpha modeling and from both lobes of the outflow being visible, is inconsistent with the SED data. Thus, despite its intermediate inclination angle, the disk of this brown dwarf does not appear to obscure the red outflow component, which is very rarely seen for T Tauri objects (only one other case).Comment: Accepted for publication at A&A; minor changes (language editing

Detection of Bovine Mastitis in Raw Milk, Using a Low-Cost NIR Spectrometer and k-NN Algorithm

[Abstract] Among the bovine diseases, mastitis causes high economic losses in the dairy production system. Nowadays, detection under field conditions is mainly performed by the California Mastitis Test, which is considered the de facto standard. However, this method presents with problems of slowness and the expensiveness of the chemical-reactive process, which is deeply dependent on an expert’s trained eye and, consequently, is highly imprecise. The aim of this work is to propose a new method for bovine mastitis detection under field conditions. The proposed method uses a low-cost, smartphone-connected NIR spectrometer which solves the aforementioned problems of slowness, expert dependency and disposability of the chemical methods. This method uses spectra in combination with two k-Nearest Neighbors models. The first model is used to detect the presence of mastitis while the second model classifies the positive cases into weak and strong. The resulting method was validated by using a leave-one-out technique where the ground truth was obtained by the California Mastitis Test. The detection model achieved an accuracy of 92.4%, while the one classifying the severity showed an accuracy of 95%.This work is part of DINTA-UTMACH and RNASA-UDC research groups. This work is partially supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III, grant number PI17/01826. It was also partially supported by different grants and projects from the Xunta de Galicia [ED431D 2017/23; ED431D 2017/16; ED431G/01; ED431C 2018/49; IN845D-2020/03]. Another source of support was the CYTED network (PCI2018\_093284) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and ScienceXunta de Galicia; ED431D 2017/23Xunta de Galicia; ED431D 2017/16Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2018/49Xunta de Galicia; IN845D-2020/0

A Survey of Super-Resolution in Iris Biometrics With Evaluation of Dictionary-Learning

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThe lack of resolution has a negative impact on the performance of image-based biometrics. While many generic super-resolution methods have been proposed to restore low-resolution images, they usually aim to enhance their visual appearance. However, an overall visual enhancement of biometric images does not necessarily correlate with a better recognition performance. Reconstruction approaches thus need to incorporate the specific information from the target biometric modality to effectively improve recognition performance. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of iris super-resolution approaches proposed in the literature. We have also adapted an eigen-patches’ reconstruction method based on the principal component analysis eigen-transformation of local image patches. The structure of the iris is exploited by building a patch-position-dependent dictionary. In addition, image patches are restored separately, having their own reconstruction weights. This allows the solution to be locally optimized, helping to preserve local information. To evaluate the algorithm, we degraded the high-resolution images from the CASIA Interval V3 database. Different restorations were considered, with 15 × 15 pixels being the smallest resolution evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, this is the smallest resolutions employed in the literature. The experimental framework is complemented with six publicly available iris comparators that were used to carry out biometric verification and identification experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms both the bilinear and bicubic interpolations at a very low resolution. The performance of a number of comparators attains an impressive equal error rate as low as 5% and a Top-1 accuracy of 77%–84% when considering the iris images of only 15 × 15 pixels. These results clearly demonstrate the benefit of using trained super-resolution techniques to improve the quality of iris images prior to matchingThis work was supported by the EU COST Action under Grant IC1106. The work of F. Alonso-Fernandez and J. Bigun was supported in part by the Swedish Research Council, in part by the Swedish Innovation Agency, and in part by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation through the CAISR/SIDUS-AIR projects. The work of J. Fierrez was supported by the Spanish MINECO/FEDER through the CogniMetrics Project under Grant TEC2015-70627-R. The authors acknowledge the Halmstad University Library for its support with the open access fee

Wild felid species richness affected by a corridor in the Lacandona forest, Mexico

Los efectos de la presencia de un corredor en la selva Lacandona, en México, en la riqueza de especies de félidos silvestres Los félidos silvestres se encuentran entre las especies más vulnerables ante la pérdida de hábitat causada por la fragmentación de los ecosistemas. Se analizó el efecto de la presencia de un corredor estructural, definido como una franja de vegetación que conecta dos fragmentos de hábitat, en la riqueza y ocupación de félidos en tres sitios de Marqués de Comillas, en Chiapas: uno comprende dos fragmentos de bosque aislados, otro presenta un corredor estructural y el último se encuentra dentro de la reserva de la biosfera Montes Azules. Se encontraron cuatro especies en el interior de la Reserva, cinco en el corredor estructural y únicamente dos (L. pardalis y H. yagouaroundi) en los fragmentos de bosque aislados. La presencia del corredor no afectó de forma significativa a la ocupación, pero debido a la baja tasa de detección, se necesita seguir investigando para descartar diferencias. Nuestros resultados resaltan la necesidad de manejar la conectividad del hábitat en los bosques remanentes para lograr la conservación de la comunidad de félidos en Marqués de Comillas, en Chiapas, México.Los efectos de la presencia de un corredor en la selva Lacandona, en México, en la riqueza de especies de félidos silvestres Los félidos silvestres se encuentran entre las especies más vulnerables ante la pérdida de hábitat causada por la fragmentación de los ecosistemas. Se analizó el efecto de la presencia de un corredor estructural, definido como una franja de vegetación que conecta dos fragmentos de hábitat, en la riqueza y ocupación de félidos en tres sitios de Marqués de Comillas, en Chiapas: uno comprende dos fragmentos de bosque aislados, otro presenta un corredor estructural y el último se encuentra dentro de la reserva de la biosfera Montes Azules. Se encontraron cuatro especies en el interior de la Reserva, cinco en el corredor estructural y únicamente dos (L. pardalis y H. yagouaroundi) en los fragmentos de bosque aislados. La presencia del corredor no afectó de forma significativa a la ocupación, pero debido a la baja tasa de detección, se necesita seguir investigando para descartar diferencias. Nuestros resultados resaltan la necesidad de manejar la conectividad del hábitat en los bosques remanentes para lograr la conservación de la comunidad de félidos en Marqués de Comillas, en Chiapas, México.Wild felids are one of the most vulnerable species due to habitat loss caused by fragmentation of ecosystems. We analyzed the effect of a structural corridor, defined as a strip of vegetation connecting two habitat patches, on the richness and habitat occupancy of felids on three sites in Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, one with two isolated forest patches, the second with a structural corridor, and the third inside the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. We found only two species (L. pardalis and H. yagouaroundi) in the isolated forest patches, five species in the structural corridor, and four species inside the Reserve. The corridor did not significantly affect occupancy, but due to the low detection rates, further investigation is needed to rule out differences. Our results highlight the need to manage habitat connectivity in the remaining forests in order to preserve the felid community of Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, México

Modeling of the Influence of Operational Parameters on Tire Lateral Dynamics

Tires play a critical role in vehicle safety. Proper modeling of tire–road interaction is essential for optimal performance of active safety systems. This work studies the influence of temperature, longitudinal vehicle speed, steering frequency, vertical load, and inflation pressure on lateral tire dynamics. To this end, a tire test bench that allows the accurate control of these parameters and the measurement of the variables of interest was used. The obtained results made it possible to propose a simple model that allowed the determination of relaxation length as a function of tire vertical load and vehicle linear speed, and the determination of a representative tread temperature. Additionally, a model has been proposed to determine the lateral friction coefficient from the aforementioned temperature. Finally, results also showed that some variables had little influence on the parameters that characterize lateral dynamicsThis work is partly supported partly by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-105572RB-I00, partly by the Economy, Knowledge, Enterprise and Universities Council of the Andalusian Regional Government under grant UMA18-FEDERJA-109, partly by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under grant FPU18/00450, and partly by the University of Malaga.Partial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag