scholarly journals LAKE ICE MONITORING WITH WEBCAMS AND CROWD-SOURCED IMAGES

2020 ◽  
Vol V-2-2020 ◽  
pp. 549-556
Author(s):  
R. Prabha ◽  
M. Tom ◽  
M. Rothermel ◽  
E. Baltsavias ◽  
L. Leal-Taixe ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Ice Formation ◽  
Freezing And Thawing ◽  
Lake Ice ◽  
Multiple Camera ◽  
Photo Sharing ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Climate Indicator

Abstract. Lake ice is a strong climate indicator and has been recognised as part of the Essential Climate Variables (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). The dynamics of freezing and thawing, and possible shifts of freezing patterns over time, can help in understanding the local and global climate systems. One way to acquire the spatio-temporal information about lake ice formation, independent of clouds, is to analyse webcam images. This paper intends to move towards a universal model for monitoring lake ice with freely available webcam data. We demonstrate good performance, including the ability to generalise across different winters and lakes, with a state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for semantic image segmentation, Deeplab v3+. Moreover, we design a variant of that model, termed Deep-U-Lab, which predicts sharper, more correct segmentation boundaries. We have tested the model’s ability to generalise with data from multiple camera views and two different winters. On average, it achieves Intersection-over-Union (IoU) values of ≈71% across different cameras and ≈69% across different winters, greatly outperforming prior work. Going even further, we show that the model even achieves 60% IoU on arbitrary images scraped from photo-sharing websites. As part of the work, we introduce a new benchmark dataset of webcam images, Photi-LakeIce, from multiple cameras and two different winters, along with pixel-wise ground truth annotations.

scholarly journals VolPy: Automated and scalable analysis pipelines for voltage imaging datasets

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. e1008806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changjia Cai ◽  
Johannes Friedrich ◽  
Amrita Singh ◽  
M. Hossein Eybposh ◽  
Eftychios A. Pnevmatikakis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Motion Correction ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Automated Segmentation ◽  
Voltage Imaging ◽  
High Data ◽  
Memory Mapping ◽  
Data Rates ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Scalable Analysis

Voltage imaging enables monitoring neural activity at sub-millisecond and sub-cellular scale, unlocking the study of subthreshold activity, synchrony, and network dynamics with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution. However, high data rates (>800MB/s) and low signal-to-noise ratios create bottlenecks for analyzing such datasets. Here we present VolPy, an automated and scalable pipeline to pre-process voltage imaging datasets. VolPy features motion correction, memory mapping, automated segmentation, denoising and spike extraction, all built on a highly parallelizable, modular, and extensible framework optimized for memory and speed. To aid automated segmentation, we introduce a corpus of 24 manually annotated datasets from different preparations, brain areas and voltage indicators. We benchmark VolPy against ground truth segmentation, simulations and electrophysiology recordings, and we compare its performance with existing algorithms in detecting spikes. Our results indicate that VolPy’s performance in spike extraction and scalability are state-of-the-art.

scholarly journals Ice Monitoring in Swiss Lakes from Optical Satellites and Webcams Using Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3555
Author(s):  
Manu Tom ◽  
Rajanie Prabha ◽  
Tianyu Wu ◽  
Emmanuel Baltsavias ◽  
Laura Leal-Taixé ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Satellite Images ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Semantic Segmentation ◽  
Lake Ice ◽  
Climate Indicators ◽  
Multi Temporal ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Optical Satellite Images

Continuous observation of climate indicators, such as trends in lake freezing, is important to understand the dynamics of the local and global climate system. Consequently, lake ice has been included among the Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), and there is a need to set up operational monitoring capabilities. Multi-temporal satellite images and publicly available webcam streams are among the viable data sources capable of monitoring lake ice. In this work we investigate machine learning-based image analysis as a tool to determine the spatio-temporal extent of ice on Swiss Alpine lakes as well as the ice-on and ice-off dates, from both multispectral optical satellite images (VIIRS and MODIS) and RGB webcam images. We model lake ice monitoring as a pixel-wise semantic segmentation problem, i.e., each pixel on the lake surface is classified to obtain a spatially explicit map of ice cover. We show experimentally that the proposed system produces consistently good results when tested on data from multiple winters and lakes. Our satellite-based method obtains mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) scores > 93%, for both sensors. It also generalises well across lakes and winters with mIoU scores > 78% and >80% respectively. On average, our webcam approach achieves mIoU values of ≈87% and generalisation scores of ≈71% and ≈69% across different cameras and winters respectively. Additionally, we generate and make available a new benchmark dataset of webcam images (Photi-LakeIce) which includes data from two winters and three cameras.

scholarly journals An ecological ‘footprint’ of climate change

2005 ◽  
Vol 272 (1571) ◽  
pp. 1427-1432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gian-Reto Walther ◽  
Silje Berger ◽  
Martin T Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Species Distribution ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Warming Trend ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
Northern Margin ◽  
Winter Temperatures ◽  
Bioclimatic Model ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Recently, there has been increasing evidence of species' range shifts due to changes in climate. Whereas most of these shifts relate ground truth biogeographic data to a general warming trend in regional or global climate data, we here present a reanalysis of both biogeographic and bioclimatic data of equal spatio-temporal resolution, covering a time span of more than 50 years. Our results reveal a coherent and synchronous shift in both species' distribution and climate. They show not only a shift in the northern margin of a species, which is in concert with gradually increasing winter temperatures in the area, they also confirm the simulated species' distribution changes expected from a bioclimatic model under the recent, relatively moderate climate change.

scholarly journals LAKE ICE DETECTION FROM SENTINEL-1 SAR WITH DEEP LEARNING

2020 ◽  
Vol V-3-2020 ◽  
pp. 409-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Tom ◽  
R. Aguilar ◽  
P. Imhof ◽  
S. Leinss ◽  
E. Baltsavias ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate ◽  
Semantic Segmentation ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Lake Ice ◽  
Convolutional Network ◽  
Important Indicator ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Ice Detection ◽  
Validation Tests

Abstract. Lake ice, as part of the Essential Climate Variable (ECV) lakes, is an important indicator to monitor climate change and global warming. The spatio-temporal extent of lake ice cover, along with the timings of key phenological events such as freeze-up and break-up, provide important cues about the local and global climate. We present a lake ice monitoring system based on the automatic analysis of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data with a deep neural network. In previous studies that used optical satellite imagery for lake ice monitoring, frequent cloud cover was a main limiting factor, which we overcome thanks to the ability of microwave sensors to penetrate clouds and observe the lakes regardless of the weather and illumination conditions. We cast ice detection as a two class (frozen, non-frozen) semantic segmentation problem and solve it using a state-of-the-art deep convolutional network (CNN).We report results on two winters (2016–17 and 2017–18) and three alpine lakes in Switzerland. The proposed model reaches mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) scores >90% on average, and >84% even for the most difficult lake. Additionally, we perform cross-validation tests and show that our algorithm generalises well across unseen lakes and winters.

scholarly journals Documentary data and the study of past droughts: a global state of the art

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 1915-1960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Brázdil ◽  
Andrea Kiss ◽  
Jürg Luterbacher ◽  
David J. Nash ◽  
Ladislava Řezníčková
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Drought Indices ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Climatic Trends ◽  
Instrumental Observations ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence ◽  
Administrative Evidence

Abstract. The use of documentary evidence to investigate past climatic trends and events has become a recognised approach in recent decades. This contribution presents the state of the art in its application to droughts. The range of documentary evidence is very wide, including general annals, chronicles, memoirs and diaries kept by missionaries, travellers and those specifically interested in the weather; records kept by administrators tasked with keeping accounts and other financial and economic records; legal-administrative evidence; religious sources; letters; songs; newspapers and journals; pictographic evidence; chronograms; epigraphic evidence; early instrumental observations; society commentaries; and compilations and books. These are available from many parts of the world. This variety of documentary information is evaluated with respect to the reconstruction of hydroclimatic conditions (precipitation, drought frequency and drought indices). Documentary-based drought reconstructions are then addressed in terms of long-term spatio-temporal fluctuations, major drought events, relationships with external forcing and large-scale climate drivers, socio-economic impacts and human responses. Documentary-based drought series are also considered from the viewpoint of spatio-temporal variability for certain continents, and their employment together with hydroclimate reconstructions from other proxies (in particular tree rings) is discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and challenges for the future use of documentary evidence in the study of droughts are presented.

scholarly journals G-Tric: generating three-way synthetic datasets with triclustering solutions

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
João Lobo ◽  
Rui Henriques ◽  
Sara C. Madeira
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Synthetic Data ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Additional Advantage ◽  
Urban Dynamics ◽  
Data Generator ◽  
Real World Datasets ◽  
Synthetic Datasets

Abstract Background Three-way data started to gain popularity due to their increasing capacity to describe inherently multivariate and temporal events, such as biological responses, social interactions along time, urban dynamics, or complex geophysical phenomena. Triclustering, subspace clustering of three-way data, enables the discovery of patterns corresponding to data subspaces (triclusters) with values correlated across the three dimensions (observations $$\times$$ × features $$\times$$ × contexts). With increasing number of algorithms being proposed, effectively comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms is paramount. These comparisons are usually performed using real data, without a known ground-truth, thus limiting the assessments. In this context, we propose a synthetic data generator, G-Tric, allowing the creation of synthetic datasets with configurable properties and the possibility to plant triclusters. The generator is prepared to create datasets resembling real 3-way data from biomedical and social data domains, with the additional advantage of further providing the ground truth (triclustering solution) as output. Results G-Tric can replicate real-world datasets and create new ones that match researchers needs across several properties, including data type (numeric or symbolic), dimensions, and background distribution. Users can tune the patterns and structure that characterize the planted triclusters (subspaces) and how they interact (overlapping). Data quality can also be controlled, by defining the amount of missing, noise or errors. Furthermore, a benchmark of datasets resembling real data is made available, together with the corresponding triclustering solutions (planted triclusters) and generating parameters. Conclusions Triclustering evaluation using G-Tric provides the possibility to combine both intrinsic and extrinsic metrics to compare solutions that produce more reliable analyses. A set of predefined datasets, mimicking widely used three-way data and exploring crucial properties was generated and made available, highlighting G-Tric’s potential to advance triclustering state-of-the-art by easing the process of evaluating the quality of new triclustering approaches.

scholarly journals COVID-19 infection map generation and detection from chest X-ray images

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysen Degerli ◽  
Mete Ahishali ◽  
Mehmet Yamac ◽  
Serkan Kiranyaz ◽  
Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Clinical Use ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Map Generation ◽  
Severity Grading ◽  
Chest X Ray ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
Aided Diagnosis

AbstractComputer-aided diagnosis has become a necessity for accurate and immediate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) detection to aid treatment and prevent the spread of the virus. Numerous studies have proposed to use Deep Learning techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, they have used very limited chest X-ray (CXR) image repositories for evaluation with a small number, a few hundreds, of COVID-19 samples. Moreover, these methods can neither localize nor grade the severity of COVID-19 infection. For this purpose, recent studies proposed to explore the activation maps of deep networks. However, they remain inaccurate for localizing the actual infestation making them unreliable for clinical use. This study proposes a novel method for the joint localization, severity grading, and detection of COVID-19 from CXR images by generating the so-called infection maps. To accomplish this, we have compiled the largest dataset with 119,316 CXR images including 2951 COVID-19 samples, where the annotation of the ground-truth segmentation masks is performed on CXRs by a novel collaborative human–machine approach. Furthermore, we publicly release the first CXR dataset with the ground-truth segmentation masks of the COVID-19 infected regions. A detailed set of experiments show that state-of-the-art segmentation networks can learn to localize COVID-19 infection with an F1-score of 83.20%, which is significantly superior to the activation maps created by the previous methods. Finally, the proposed approach achieved a COVID-19 detection performance with 94.96% sensitivity and 99.88% specificity.

scholarly journals Spatio-Temporal Variations in COVID-19 in Relation to the Global Climate Distribution and Fluctuations

2021 ◽  
pp. 100417
Author(s):  
Olaniran Jonathan Matthew ◽  
Adebayo Oluwole Eludoyin ◽  
Kehinde Sunday Oluwadiya
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate ◽  
Temporal Variations ◽  
Spatio Temporal

App2Vec: Context-Aware Application Usage Prediction

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Huandong Wang ◽  
Yong Li ◽  
Mu Du ◽  
Zhenhui Li ◽  
Depeng Jin
Keyword(s):  
Dirichlet Process ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Context Aware ◽  
Challenging Problem ◽  
Performance Gap ◽  
Bayesian Mixture Model ◽  
Bayesian Mixture ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Both app developers and service providers have strong motivations to understand when and where certain apps are used by users. However, it has been a challenging problem due to the highly skewed and noisy app usage data. Moreover, apps are regarded as independent items in existing studies, which fail to capture the hidden semantics in app usage traces. In this article, we propose App2Vec, a powerful representation learning model to learn the semantic embedding of apps with the consideration of spatio-temporal context. Based on the obtained semantic embeddings, we develop a probabilistic model based on the Bayesian mixture model and Dirichlet process to capture when , where , and what semantics of apps are used to predict the future usage. We evaluate our model using two different app usage datasets, which involve over 1.7 million users and 2,000+ apps. Evaluation results show that our proposed App2Vec algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in app usage prediction with a performance gap of over 17.0%.

scholarly journals Critical Aspects of Person Counting and Density Estimation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Roland Perko ◽  
Manfred Klopschitz ◽  
Alexander Almer ◽  
Peter M. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Density Estimation ◽  
Network Architecture ◽  
Reference Data ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Limit State ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Ground Truth Generation ◽  
Baseline Approach ◽  
Critical Aspects

Many scientific studies deal with person counting and density estimation from single images. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied for these tasks. Even though often better results are reported, it is often not clear where the improvements are resulting from, and if the proposed approaches would generalize. Thus, the main goal of this paper was to identify the critical aspects of these tasks and to show how these limit state-of-the-art approaches. Based on these findings, we show how to mitigate these limitations. To this end, we implemented a CNN-based baseline approach, which we extended to deal with identified problems. These include the discovery of bias in the reference data sets, ambiguity in ground truth generation, and mismatching of evaluation metrics w.r.t. the training loss function. The experimental results show that our modifications allow for significantly outperforming the baseline in terms of the accuracy of person counts and density estimation. In this way, we get a deeper understanding of CNN-based person density estimation beyond the network architecture. Furthermore, our insights would allow to advance the field of person density estimation in general by highlighting current limitations in the evaluation protocols.

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