Cluttering Reduction for Interactive Navigation and Visualization of Historical Images

Iconographic representations, such as historical photos of geographic spaces, are precious cultural heritage resources capable of describing a particular geographical area’s evolution over time. These photographic collections may vary in size, between hundreds and thousands of items. With the advent of the digital era, many of these documents have been digitized, spatialized, and are available online. Browsing through these digital image collections represents new challenges. This paper examines the topic of historical image exploration in a virtual environment enabling the co-visualization of historical photos into a contemporary 3D scene. We address the topic of user interaction considering the potential volume of the input data. Our methodology is based on design guidelines that rely on visual perception techniques to ease visual complexity and improve saliency on specific cues. The designs are additionally implemented following an image-based rendering approach and evaluated in a group of users. Overall, these propositions may be a notable addition to creating innovative ways to visualize and discover historical images in a virtual geographic environment.

Ancient Metallurgical Center in Georgia

Georgia is situated in Caucasia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Its terrain is created by the Greater and the Lesser Caucasus, rivers with great volume of water flowing between them and coastal plains. The territory of the whole Caucasus and, specifically, Georgia, is one of the main communication areas linking ancient Steppe empires with Near Eastern civilizations (pl. 1), which, alongside rich natural conditions, significantly determined formation of human society from ancient times and proved favourable to its development. Formation and evolution of the human society in any corner of the earth, from the earliest times to ancient civilizations, largely depends on the geographic environment and reasonable exploitation of natural resources by humans. With its mild climate, fertile lands, flora, fauna, alpine pastures and low-lying fields, diverse natural resources, extensive river network, etc. Georgia has always provided convenient conditions for human habitation and development of economic activities. Southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountain Range and the highlands of the Lesser Caucasus are especially rich in metallogenic provinces. The present article deals with when production of different metals started here and whether it became one of the main bases for development of the society.

Detecting Electromagnetic Geographical Environment Changes Based on the Frequency-Intensity Curve

Electromagnetic geographic environment is closely related to human life. With continuous popularization of public infrastructures and daily electronic instruments, such as electric power communication systems and household appliances, electromagnetic radiation sources have increased sharply in the geographic environment, which leads to increasingly serious electromagnetic radiation pollution. Thus, it is significant to monitor, evaluate, and analyze the electromagnetic radiation condition and explore its changing law in the environment. However, the traditional monitoring method can only detect anomalies within certain frequencies in the fixed stations. To fill this gap, this research first develops a vehicle-mounted electromagnetic environment monitoring system to collect both spatial positioning data and electromagnetic data of the whole frequency range. The acquired data are then used to construct the location-based frequency-intensity curve to reflect the variation of electromagnetic radiation at different frequency ranges. On this basis, a curve similarity measurement method is introduced to analyze the similarity of different curves, which is effective to diagnose time-varying sources from both global and local perspectives. This research provides a real-time mobile monitoring method, which is significant to know the dynamic variation of local electromagnetic environment and promotes subsequent comprehensive geographic analyses.

Synchronized Information Acquisition Method for Virtual Geographic Scene Image Synthesis in Cities Based on Wireless Network Technology

At present, in the process of image synthesis information acquisition of urban virtual geographic scene, there is information complexity. The existing acquisition technology is easy to disturb in the process of information positioning and transmission, resulting in large acquisition delay and affecting the final synthesis quality of the image. In response to the above problems, the method of synchronous information acquisition for urban virtual geographic scene image synthesis based on wireless network technology is studied. Based on the construction of an urban virtual geographic environment, the spatial localization of the sign target of geographic scene image synthesis is carried out, and the optical flow method is used to register the urban geographic scene images. Based on the greedy algorithm of the beacon to design the synchronous wireless network route for urban virtual scene image synthesis, and after the grid division of the wireless network in the synthesis information acquisition area, the packets of each acquisition node are acquired and transmitted according to the designed wireless network route to realize the synchronous acquisition of image synthesis information. The comparison experimental data show that the acquisition delay of the studied information synchronization acquisition method is less than 0.5 s, the acquisition synchronization rate is significantly improved, and the quality of the synthesized images is better by applying the information acquired by the method, and the practical use is better.

Understanding Ethnolinguistic Differences: The Roles of Geography and Trade

I study the role of trade on inter-ethnic linguistic differences in the long run. I hypothesise that the geographic environment of neighbouring ethnic groups determines their potential gains from trade, and that the frequency of inter-ethnic trade—and resulting social interactions—shape the co-evolution of language. As a test of this hypothesis, I build a georeferenced dataset to examine the border region of spatially adjacent ethnic groups, together with variation in the set of potentially cultivatable crops at the onset of the Columbian Exchange, to identify how variation in land productivity impacts linguistic differences between adjacent ethnic groups. I find that ethnic groups separated across geographic regions with high variation in land productivity are more similar in language than groups separated across more homogeneous regions. I develop a model to theoretically ground this link between land productivity variation and inter-ethnic trade, and provide empirical evidence in support of this mechanism, including direct evidence of a causal link between land productivity variation and an ethnic group’s reliance on trade for food and subsistence in pre-modern times.

Geographic Information System for Mapping and Complaint of Damaged Roads

Indonesia is a massive archipelago of 1.919.400 km², containing roads that span at 542.000 km across various terrain conditions. This diverse geographic environment is a challenge to road constructions and repairs across the country, which has lead to disruption in public service and traffic accidents each year. We propose the Geographic Information System for Mapping and Complaint of Damaged Roads, a solution which can provide users a digital interface to report damaged roads to the transportation department in their area. This research uses Google Maps API to digitize and make a complaint about damaged roads. The result of this research is an android application for the users and a website application for the road managers. The android application is used by the users to make complaints of damaged roads. The web application is used by road managers to draw the road on Google Maps using polyline feature. With this our goal is to systematize the handling of damaged roads information, leading to faster service times and hopefully help reduce the level of traffic accidents in Indonesia. Keywords: Complaint, Damaged road, Geographic Information System, Google Maps, Road digitization.

A Study on the Spatial Characteristics of Jiarong Tibetan Settlements Based on the Theory of Pattern Language

This article selects three typical Jiarong Tibetan traditional settlements as the research objects, using the technical means of on-site surveying, mapping and drone photography to conduct field trips to the three settlements, and use this as a research basis to analyze the spatial layout characteristics of traditional Jiarong Tibetan villages in the region, and summarize their pattern language. The study found: 1)Although differences in geographic environment lead to slightly different types of pattern language in the same Tibetan village, but they are also similar to each other. 2)The Jiarong Tibetan traditional settlement has always adhered to the basic concept of "follow nature and adapt to local conditions" to develop in an orderly manner, conform to the terrain, and often present a spatial sequence of "religious space-connecting space-living space". 3)Jiarong Tibetan traditional settlements are characterized by a religious building as the core, and the surrounding buildings are distributed in a centripetal manner. 4)Jiarong Tibetan traditional settlements always follow the grammatical principles of locality and order in their development and expansion, the design and layout of spatial elements are mostly guided by traditional geomantic and religious views.5)The spatial layout schematic language system of Tibetan traditional settlements has a positive effect on the inheritance and protection of the same type of villages. The spatial universality of vocabulary, syntax and grammar is conducive to the effective protection and sustainable development of traditional Tibetan village landscapes.

influence of the geographical environment on Islamic banking performance

The main goal of this study is to examine the influence of the geographic environment on the performance of Islamic banks present in four regions: Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. To achieve this goal, we have used daily data from 113 Islamic banks between 2010 and 2019. We applied different methodological approaches, such as principal component analysis and quantile regression with fixed effects for panel data. As a result, we found that the analysis of the main components shows that the performance of Islamic banks varies between regions. The regression of the linear panel highlights that the geographic environment positively and significantly affects the Islamic banking system, suggesting the importance of this aspect’s effects. Finally, the environmental effect seems to vary with the quantiles, bringing positive effect to the lower quantile and negative effect to the highest quantile. This quantile specification points to the environment-performance nonlinear relationship of the Islamic bank, reflecting a discipline variable in the time imposed by the Council of Shariah or Islamic Law. This discovery helps to better explain the main difference between Islamic banks in the East and those in the West, and also allows investors to adjust their portfolio options when considering the products of Islamic banks according to regional specificities.