A set of criteria for evaluating map application design in a mobile environment

With the appearance of smartphones and affordable mobile phone plans including (internet) data within the last decade, mobile cartography in the sense of map applications became available to a wide user group including professionals and non-professionals. This paper defines the field of mobile cartography, deals with new research areas and prerequisites concerning mobile cartography and a set of criteria for evaluating map applications has been derived. For this work, the criteria have been applied to several map applications in order to evaluate them and present recent features and possible actions. In particular, the focus has been set on high-quality map applications for Austria and on novel navigation and routing capabilities. Results showed that the guideline presented in this paper can already be well applied but can still be improved upon.

A novel artificial intelligence model for color image quality assessment for security enhanement weighted by visual saliency

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the enhancement and method of computer system that handles tasks which requires human like intelligence such as recognition, language translation and visual interpretation. Subjective image quality assessment (IQA) is difficult to be implemented in real-time systems, methodology for enhancing the involvement in producing IQA model is to improve the quality of image by significant evaluation. Intuitively, human eyes are not sensitive to the distortion and damage from the area with lesser visual saliency (VS), VS is closely related to IQA. With this consideration, an effective IQA was proposed, which involved two processes. The local quality map of a distorted image was computed using the structural similarity function of its feature attributes, such as brightness, chrominance and gradient. Second, the local quality map was weighted with visual saliency (VS) to get the objective evaluation of image quality. The VS was modeled by extracting the saliency of low-level features of the image, wiping off the molestation information from these saliency based on an apriori threshold, and combining the effective information to construct the saliency map. Image processing using fuzzy is gathering features and segments as fuzzy set while processing images. The experiments on the two largest database for six classical IQA metrics demonstrate that performance of weighted-VS IQA metrics is superior to the performance of no weighted-VS IQA metrics, and the proposed IQA method has higher computational accuracy than the other IQA metrics under a moderate computational complexity, especially for two types of distortion images, such as local block-wise (Block) and fast-fading (FTF).

Development of Nationwide Road Quality Map: Remote Sensing Meets Field Sensing

In this study, we measured the in situ international roughness index (IRI) for first-degree roads spanning more than 1300 km in East Azerbaijan Province, Iran, using a quarter car (QC). Since road quality mapping with in situ measurements is a costly and time-consuming task, we also developed new equations for constructing a road quality proxy map (RQPM) using discriminant analysis and multispectral information from high-resolution Sentinel-2 images, which we calibrated using the in situ data on the basis of geographic information system (GIS) data. The developed equations using optimum index factor (OIF) and norm R provide a valuable tool for creating proxy maps and mitigating hazards at the network scale, not only for primary roads but also for secondary roads, and for reducing the costs of road quality monitoring. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the norm R equation for road classification in East Azerbaijan province are 65.0% and 0.59, respectively.

Towards Development of a Real-Time Point Feature Quality Assessment Method for Volunteered Geographic Information Using the Internet of Things

One of the most important challenges of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the quality assessment. Existing methods of VGI quality assessment, either assess the quality by comparing a reference map with the VGI map or deriving the quality from the metadata. The first approach does not work for a real-time scenario and the latter delivers approximate values of the quality. Internet of Things (IoT) networks provide real-time observations for environment monitoring. Moreover, they publish more precise information than VGI. This paper introduces a method to assess the quality of VGI in real-time using IoT observations. The proposed method filters sensor observation outliers in the first step. Then it matches sensors and volunteers’ relationships in terms of location, time, and measurement type similarity using a hypergraph model. Then the quality of matched data is assessed by calculating positional and attribute accuracy. To evaluate the method, VGI data of the water level and quality in Tarashk–Bakhtegan–Maharlou water basin is studied. A VGI quality map of the data is assessed by a referenced authoritative map. The output of this step is a VGI quality map, which was used as a reference to check the proposed method quality. Then this reference VGI quality map and the proposed method VGI quality map are compared to assess positional and attribute accuracy. Results demonstrated that 76% of the method results have less than 20 m positional error (i.e., difference with the reference VGI quality map). Additionally, more than 92% of the proposed method VGI data have higher than 90% attribute accuracy in terms of similarity with the reference VGI quality map. These findings support the notion that the proposed method can be used to assess VGI quality in real-time.

Application of GIS in land quality mapping for agricultural planning of Ha Giang Province

In Vietnam, agriculture development is one of the most important tasks to secure food resources and reduce poverty. The north of Vietnam is the high mountain areas which are in the low development stage, agriculture is the main source of income of households. Ha Giang is a typical mountainous province, in which land management is very important in the development of economic. To get good land management, land evaluation is needed. The land quality evaluation is an important step in the land evaluation process. The paper presents the application of a geographical information system (GIS) and establish the land quality map in Ha Giang province in accordance with the Food & Agriculture Organization framework. The evaluation process starts from defining the land quality indicators which are in 4 categories: Climatic, Terrain, Soil, and Hydrological. The indicators are standardized and classify according to the FAO land quality evaluation system, all of data is processes in GIS environment, each indicator is a data layer in GIS database. The result is maps of indicators and the land quality map of Ha Giang province. There are 126 land quality units in which, more than half of them are of Feralsol. The result of the study can be used in various fields of management as agriculture, land use, infrastructure development,…

Hydrogeology of the southern Middle Tiber Valley (Central Italy)

The aim of this work is to contribute to the hydrogeological knowledge regarding the southern Middle Tiber Valley focusing on the continental and marine units that fill the Paglia-Tiber graben in the northern Latium Region (central Italy). An important hydrogeological survey was performed in the summer of 2008, and a considerable quantity of piezometric, physio-chemical and flow data were collected. Four geological cross sections were realized, and a hydrogeological map and a groundwater quality map of the area were produced to obtain a conceptual groundwater flow model.

Assessment of Myosteatosis on Computed Tomography by Automatic Generation of a Muscle Quality Map Using a Web-Based Toolkit: Feasibility Study

Background Muscle quality is associated with fatty degeneration or infiltration of the muscle, which may be associated with decreased muscle function and increased disability. Objective The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of automated quantitative measurements of the skeletal muscle on computed tomography (CT) images to assess normal-attenuation muscle and myosteatosis. Methods We developed a web-based toolkit to generate a muscle quality map by categorizing muscle components. First, automatic segmentation of the total abdominal muscle area (TAMA), visceral fat area, and subcutaneous fat area was performed using a predeveloped deep learning model on a single axial CT image at the L3 vertebral level. Second, the Hounsfield unit of each pixel in the TAMA was measured and categorized into 3 components: normal-attenuation muscle area (NAMA), low-attenuation muscle area (LAMA), and inter/intramuscular adipose tissue (IMAT) area. The myosteatosis area was derived by adding the LAMA and IMAT area. We tested the feasibility of the toolkit using randomly selected healthy participants, comprising 6 different age groups (20 to 79 years). With stratification by sex, these indices were compared between age groups using 1-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Correlations between the myosteatosis area or muscle densities and fat areas were analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficient r. Results A total of 240 healthy participants (135 men and 105 women) with 40 participants per age group were included in the study. In the 1-way ANOVA, the NAMA, LAMA, and IMAT were significantly different between the age groups in both male and female participants (P≤.004), whereas the TAMA showed a significant difference only in male participants (male, P<.001; female, P=.88). The myosteatosis area had a strong negative correlation with muscle densities (r=–0.833 to –0.894), a moderate positive correlation with visceral fat areas (r=0.607 to 0.669), and a weak positive correlation with the subcutaneous fat areas (r=0.305 to 0.441). Conclusions The automated web-based toolkit is feasible and enables quantitative CT assessment of myosteatosis, which can be a potential quantitative biomarker for evaluating structural and functional changes brought on by aging in the skeletal muscle.