Document analysis at DFKI. - Part 1: Image analysis and text recognition

Document analysis is responsible for an essential progress in office automation. This paper is part of an overview about the combined research efforts in document analysis at the DFKI. Common to all document analysis projects is the global goal of providing a high level electronic representation of documents in terms of iconic, structural, textual, and semantic information. These symbolic document descriptions enable an "intelligent\u27; access to a document database. Currently there are three ongoing document analysis projects at DFKI: INCA, OMEGA, and PASCAL2000/PASCAL+. Though the projects pursue different goals in different application domains, they all share the same problems which have to be resolved with similar techniques. For that reason the activities in these projects are bundled to avoid redundant work. At DFKI we have divided the problem of document analysis into two main tasks, text recognition and text analysis, which themselves are divided into a set of subtasks. In a series of three research reports the work of the document analysis and office automation department at DFKI is presented. The first report discusses the problem of text recognition, the second that of text analysis. In a third report we describe our concept for a specialized document analysis knowledge representation language. The report in hand describes the activities dealing with the text recognition task. Text recognition covers the phase starting with capturing a document image up to identifying the written words. This comprises the following subtasks: preprocessing the pictorial information, segmenting into blocks, lines, words, and characters, classifying characters, and identifying the input words. For each subtask several competing solution algorithms, called specialists or knowledge sources, may exist. To efficiently control and organize these specialists an intelligent situation-based planning component is necessary, which is also described in this report. It should be mentioned that the planning component is also responsible to control the overall document analysis system instead of the text recognition phase onl

Global maps of soil temperature

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km2 resolution for 0–5 and 5–15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km2 pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world\u27s major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (−0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Global maps of soil temperature

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km² resolution for 0–5 and 5–15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e., offset) between in-situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km² pixels (summarized from 8500 unique temperature sensors) across all the world’s major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (-0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in-situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Global maps of soil temperature.

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km2 resolution for 0-5 and 5-15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km2 pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world's major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (-0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Intelligence and Language Scores from Children at a Special School for Learning Disabled at the Age of 7 and 9 Years

Im Rahmen einer prospektiven Längsschnittstudie an Sonderschülern wurden Intelligenz und sprachliche Leistungen testpsychologisch zu Beginn der Schulzeit und zwei Jahre später erhoben. Anhand der Ergebnisse zweier Stichproben aus Erlangen und München konnte dargestellt werden, daß die Intelligenzleistungen eine hohe Stabilität aufwiesen. Im sprachlichen Bereich liegt eine geringere Stabilität vor, insbesondere im Sprachverständnis sind Leistungssteigerungen zu vermerken. In der expressiven Sprache bleibt der Rückstand gegenüber der durchschnittlichen Leistung Gleichaltriger konstant, die Artikulation verbessert sich erwartungsgemäß. Schwierigkeiten haben die untersuchten Sonderschulkinder nach wie vor mit der verbalen Merkfähigkeit. (DIPF/Orig.)Prospective longitudinal data from children at a school or learning disabled were obtained. Intelligence and language scores were assessed at first grade and two years later. The results of two samples from Erlangen and München showed a high stability of the intelligence scores but less stability of the language scores. There were remarkable improvements in language comprehension. Expressive language had a constant lag compared with the test-standard of children of the same age; the articulation did improve as expected. The children from this special school still had problems with verbal short term memory. (DIPF/Orig.

Conditions of Conduct Disorder in a Clinic-referred Sample

Von den Patienten der Abteilung für Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, die in den Jahren von 1989 bis 6/1994 ambulant oder stationär diagnostiziert oder behandelt wurden (n = 1076), werden Patienten mit Störung des Sozialverhaltens (n=235) mit den Patienten ohne psychiatrische Diagnose (n=324) sowie mit den Patienten mit anderen psychiatrischen Diagnosen verglichen. Es interessierten hierbei Häufigkeiten, Altersverteilung, Geschlechterverhältnis, die Häufigkeit umschriebener Entwicklungsverzögerungen, das Intelligenzniveau sowie die Häufigkeit abnormer psychosozialer Umstände der drei Vergleichsgruppen. Als zusätzliche Parameter wurden die Religiosität der Familien sowie der Fernsehkonsum der Kinder untersucht. Signifikante Überhöhungen bei Kindern mit Störungen des Sozialverhaltens ergaben sich in den Bereichen abnorme psychosoziale Umstände sowie vermehrter Fernsehkonsum der Kinder. (DIPF/Orig.)The patients referred to our center from 1989 to 6/1994 (n= 1076) were devided into three groups: "conduct disorder" (n=235), "none psychiatric diagnosis" (n=324) and "other psychiatric diagnosis" (n=517). These groups were compared with regard to frequency, age, sex, the frequency of specific developmental disorders, the lQ, and the frequency of abnormal psychosocial circumstances. Additional the religiosity of the families and the televiewing of the children were investigated. Abnormal psychosocial circumstances and enlarged televiewing of the children were significantly associated with conduct disorders. (DIPF/Orig.

Message Extraction from Printed Documents - A Complete Solution -

The task to be solved within our core research was the design and development of a document analysis toolbox covering typical document analysis tasks such as document understanding, information extraction and text recognition. In order to prove the feasibility of our concepts, we have developed the prototypical analysis system OfficeMAID. The system analyzes documents, as used in the daily work of a purchasing department, by a-priori knowledge about workflows and document features. In this way the system provides goal-directed information extraction, shallow understanding and process identification for given documents (paper, fax, e-mail). This work has been supported by a grant from the BMBF (ITW 9702). 1 Introduction Generally, printed documents are neither generated for scanning and automatic processing nor for easy integration into electronic workflows. Therefore, it is hard to transform them adequately for further processing by electronic means. This is the reason why DMS --- in..