Walking is being promoted for health and transportation purposes across all climatic regions in the US and beyond. Despite this, an uncomfortable microclimate condition along sidewalks is one of the major deterrents of walking, and more empirical research is needed to determine the risks of heat exposure to pedestrians while walking. This study examined the effect of street trees and grass alon...

The automatic analysis of 3D point clouds has become a crucial task in photogrammetry, remote sensing and computer vision. Whereas modern range cameras simultaneously provide both range and intensity images with high frame rates, other devices can be used to obtain further information which could be quite valuable for tasks such as object detection or scene interpretation. In particular thermal...

Recently, computer graphics (CG) have been used to produce visual images not only for the movie industry, but also for a wide array of other uses such as simulating outdoor views in the landscape design and simulators for training different types of operators. In the future, high quality 3D graphics technology will undoubtedly be used to produce visual content. Against this backdrop, this study...

COLOR-BASED MODELS FOR OUTDOOR MACHINE VISION FEBRUARY, 2002 SHASHI D. BULUSWAR, B.A., GOSHEN COLLEGE M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Allen R. Hanson This study develops models for illumination and surface reflectance for use in outdoor color vision, and in particular for predicting the color of surfaces under outdoor c...

The main objectives of this study were to investigate vernacular passive cooling techniques and their potential application for improving indoor thermal comfort of naturally ventilated, modern brick terraced houses in Malaysia. Field measurement was conducted in two traditional timber Malay houses and two traditional masonry Chinese shophouses to examine their indoor thermal environments. The r...

This study develops models for illumination and surface reflectance for use in outdoor color vision, and in particular for predicting the color of surfaces under outdoor conditions. Existing daylight and reflectance models have limitations that reduce their applicability in outdoor contexts. This work makes three specific contributions: (i) an explanation of why the current standard CIE dayligh...

The level of satisfaction with an environment differs among individuals, which may be caused by social, psychological and physical factors. One of the environmental factors affecting physical and mental satisfaction, is the thermal condition of space. In recent years, the importance of thermal comfort has been accentuated due to the climate change and global warming, increasing the number of st...

This paper presents a hybrid segmentation algorithm, which provides a synthetic image description in terms of regions. This method has been used to segment images of outdoor scenes. We have applied our segmentation algorithm to color images and images encoding 3D information. 5 different color spaces were tested. The segmentation results obtained with each color space are compared.

BACKGROUND Little attention has been paid to how heat-related health effects vary with the micro-urban variation of outdoor temperatures. This study explored whether people located in micro-urban heat islands are at higher risk of mortality during hot summer days. METHODS Data used included (1) daily mortality for Montreal (Canada) for June-August 1990-2003, (2) daily mean ambient outdoor tem...