Scientists Sift Through Urban Soils

Compacted Urban Soils and their Remediation

The effects of urbanization on soil structure can be extensive. Infiltration of rain water through soils can be greatly reduced, plus the benefits of infiltration and biofiltration devices can be severely jeopardized. Our research group (along with others), have been studying disturbed urban soils for several decades, both in the laboratory and in the field. The effects of compaction on infiltr...

A review of heavy metal contaminations in urban soils, urban road dusts and agricultural soils from China

Quantification of phytoplankton bloom dynamics by citizen scientists in urban and peri-urban environments

Freshwater ecosystems are severely threatened by urban development and agricultural intensification. Increased occurrence of algal blooms is a main issue, and the identification of local dynamics and drivers is hampered by a lack of field data. In this study, data from 13 cities (250 water bodies) were used to examine the capacity of trained community members to assess elevated phytoplankton de...

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment through SIFT Intensity

SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) points are scale-space extreme points, representing local minutiae structure features in the Gaussian scale space. SIFT intensity, as a novel no-reference metric, is feasible to assess various common distortions without the access to reference images. The metric introduces image preprocessing: neighborhood enhancement through contrast enhancement of adja...

VF-SIFT: Very Fast SIFT Feature Matching

Feature-based image matching is one of the most fundamental issues in computer vision tasks. As the number of features increases, the matching process rapidly becomes a bottleneck. This paper presents a novel method to speed up SIFT feature matching. The main idea is to extend SIFT feature by a few pairwise independent angles, which are invariant to rotation, scale and illumination changes. Dur...