Giant X-ray Bump in GRB 121027A: Evidence for Fall-back Disk Accretion

A particularly interesting discovery in observations of GRB 121027A is that of a giant X-ray bump detected by the Swift/X-Ray Telescope. The X-ray afterglow re-brightens sharply at about 1000 s after the trigger by more than two orders of magnitude in less than 200 s. This X-ray bump lasts for more than 10 ks. It is quite different from typical X-ray flares. In this Letter we propose a fall-back accretion model to interpret this X-ray bump within the context of the collapse of a massive star for a long-duration gamma-ray burst. The required fall-back radius of about 3.5e10 cm and mass of about 0.9-2.6 solar masses imply that a significant part of the helium envelope should survive through the mass loss during the last stage of the massive progenitor of GRB 121027A.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2013, ApJL, 767:L3

GeoSay: A Geometric Saliency for Extracting Buildings in Remote Sensing Images

Automatic extraction of buildings in remote sensing images is an important but challenging task and finds many applications in different fields such as urban planning, navigation and so on. This paper addresses the problem of buildings extraction in very high-spatial-resolution (VHSR) remote sensing (RS) images, whose spatial resolution is often up to half meters and provides rich information about buildings. Based on the observation that buildings in VHSR-RS images are always more distinguishable in geometry than in texture or spectral domain, this paper proposes a geometric building index (GBI) for accurate building extraction, by computing the geometric saliency from VHSR-RS images. More precisely, given an image, the geometric saliency is derived from a mid-level geometric representations based on meaningful junctions that can locally describe geometrical structures of images. The resulting GBI is finally measured by integrating the derived geometric saliency of buildings. Experiments on three public and commonly used datasets demonstrate that the proposed GBI achieves the state-of-the-art performance and shows impressive generalization capability. Additionally, GBI preserves both the exact position and accurate shape of single buildings compared to existing methods