Retrogressive thaw slumps along the Qinghai-Tibet Engineering Corridor: a comprehensive inventory and their distribution characteristics

The important Qinghai Tibet Engineering Corridor (QTEC) covers the part of the Highway and Railway underlain by permafrost. The permafrost on the QTEC is sensitive to climate warming and human disturbance and suffers accelerating degradation. Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTSs) are slope failures due to the thawing of ice-rich permafrost. They typically retreat and expand at high rates, damaging infrastructure, and releasing carbon preserved in frozen ground. Along the critical and essential corridor, RTSs are commonly distributed but remain poorly investigated. To compile the first comprehensive inventory of RTSs, this study uses an iteratively semi-automatic method built on deep learning to delineate thaw slumps in the 2019 PlanetScope CubeSat images over a ~54,000 km2 corridor area. The method effectively assesses every image pixel using DeepLabv3+ with limited training samples and manually inspects the deep-learning-identified thaw slumps based on their geomorphic features and temporal changes. The inventory includes 875 RTSs, of which 474 are clustered in the Beiluhe region, and 38 are near roads or railway lines. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.933957 (Xia et al., 2021), with the Chinese version at https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/zh-hans/disallow/50de2d4f-75e1-4bad-b316-6fb91d915a1a/. These RTSs tend to be located on north-facing slopes with gradients of 1.2°–18.1° and distributed at medium elevations ranging from 4511 to 5212 m. a.s.l. They prefer to develop on land receiving relatively low annual solar radiation (from 2900 to 3200 kWh m−2), alpine meadow covered, and silt loam underlay. The results provide a significant and fundamental benchmark dataset for quantifying thaw slump changes in this vulnerable region undergoing strong climatic warming and extensive human activities.

Testing the accuracy of 3D automatic landmarking via genome-wide association studies

Various advances in 3D automatic phenotyping and landmark-based geometric morphometric methods have been made. While it is generally accepted that automatic landmarking compromises the capture of the biological variation, no studies have directly tested the actual impact of such landmarking approaches in analyses requiring a large number of specimens and for which the precision of phenotyping is crucial to extract an actual biological signal adequately. Here, we use a recently developed 3D atlas-based automatic landmarking method to test its accuracy in detecting QTLs associated with craniofacial development of the house mouse skull and lower jaws for a large number of specimens (circa 700) that were previously phenotyped via a semi-automatic landmarking method complemented with manual adjustment. We compare both landmarking methods with univariate and multivariate mapping of the skull and the lower jaws. We find that most significant SNPs and QTLs are not recovered based on the data derived from the automatic landmarking method. Our results thus confirm the notion that information is lost in the automated landmarking procedure although somewhat dependent on the analyzed structure. The automatic method seems to capture certain types of structures slightly better, such as lower jaws whose shape is almost entirely summarized by its outline and could be assimilated as a 2D flat object. By contrast, the more apparent 3D features exhibited by a structure such as the skull are not adequately captured by the automatic method. We conclude that using 3D atlas-based automatic landmarking methods requires careful consideration of the experimental question.

Surface reconstruction post-processing method for 3D- scanned objects

3D scanning is widely used in multiple applications to obtain high precision / non-destructive documentation of real-life objects, which is especially important in Cultural Heritage (CH) preservation. However, some issues (in particular missing parts which are commonly known as “holes”) affect the accuracy of the obtained 3D model after the scanning procedure and requires time-consuming post-processing procedures, which include manual editing by highly-trained personnel. In this article an automatic method to reconstruct the obtained surface of 3D models is proposed, improving previously obtained results for high-density point clouds.

Weighted Quasi-Interpolant Spline Approximations of Planar Curvilinear Profiles in Digital Images

The approximation of curvilinear profiles is very popular for processing digital images and leads to numerous applications such as image segmentation, compression and recognition. In this paper, we develop a novel semi-automatic method based on quasi-interpolation. The method consists of three steps: a preprocessing step exploiting an edge detection algorithm; a splitting procedure to break the just-obtained set of edge points into smaller subsets; and a final step involving the use of a local curve approximation, the Weighted Quasi Interpolant Spline Approximation (wQISA), chosen for its robustness to data perturbation. The proposed method builds a sequence of polynomial spline curves, connected C0 in correspondence of cusps, G1 otherwise. To curb underfitting and overfitting, the computation of local approximations exploits the supervised learning paradigm. The effectiveness of the method is shown with simulation on real images from various application domains.

Image-based processing simulation of shock wave propagation through the area of ionization instability

A partially automatic method of digital processing images (photographs, shadow and Schlieren pictures) for the analysis of experimental data is proposed. The method is utilized to investigate the effect of the region of ionization instability created by a glow gas discharge on the front of an initially flat shock wave. The proposed method is based on a composition of simple image processing operations and makes it possible to perform simulations taking into account the real geometry of the ionization strata and the shape of the front of a shock wave based on the obtained experimental images. First, as a result of digital processing the geometry of experimental objects is extracted from the images. This information is then embedded in the Navier-Stokes code for conducting simulations. New results for the real geometry of ionization strata of different scales are presented which confirmed the previous ones obtained for the density homogeneously stratified source model.