Vegetation moderates a microclimate by casting shadows, increasing light reflection, evaporation and perspiration; and correcting wind patterns. The present study aims to investigate the microclimatic role of vegetated surfaces and bodies in improving thermal comfort in outdoor spaces between buildings. The main research question is which of the green system modes, that is, horizontal vegetatio...

One of the problems that hinders the application of conventional methods for shape-from-shading to the analysis of shiny objects is the presence of local highlights. The first of these are specularities which appear at locations on the viewed object where the local surface normal is the bisector of the light source and viewing directions. Highlights also occur at the occluding limb of the objec...

The correction of non-uniform illumination and the elimination of shading artifacts is an important preprocessing task used in a great number of image processing applications such as segmentation, registration or quantitative analysis. Although, a careful and accurate set up of the image acquisition system may degrade the importance of a brightness normalization algorithm, non-uniform illuminat...

Ray-traced global illumination (GI) is becoming widespread in production rendering but incoherent secondary ray traversal limits practical rendering to scenes that fit in memory. Incoherent shading also leads to intractable performance with production-scale textures forcing renderers to resort to caching of irradiance, radiosity, and other values to amortize expensive shading. Unfortunately, su...

Two winter wheat cultivars (the functional stay-green CN12 and non-stay-green CN19) were used to investigate the effects of ear-shading on grain yield and to elucidate the differential mechanisms of different cultivars. The photosynthetic parameters, chlorophyll fluorescence, antioxidant enzyme activities, and chlorophyll contents were measured 0, 15 and 30 days after heading (DAH) under both s...

The 'colour-shading effect' describes the phenomenon whereby a chromatic pattern influences perceived shape-from-shading in a luminance pattern. Specifically, the depth corrugations perceived in sinusoidal luminance gratings can be enhanced by spatially non-aligned, and suppressed by spatially aligned sinusoidal chromatic gratings. Here we examine whether colour contrast can influence perceived...

Meadows of the endemic seagrass Posidonia oceanica are threatened in the Mediterranean due to a general deterioration of the light environment that becomes critical when light irradiance is insufficient to meet the carbon requirements of the system. Here, we conduct a 3 wk, in situ shading experiment (8 levels plus controls) to determine the threshold of irradiance for balanced metabolism in a ...

A retrospective study was conducted in 1993 which quantified the effects of overstory shading on both spruce weevil, Pissodes strobi (Peck) damage, and leader growth on interior white spruce, Picea g/auca (Moench) Voss x engelmannii (Parry ex Englem.). The study was undertaken in the Prince George and Cariboo Forest Regions of British Columbia where the weevil is causing extensive damage to pla...

graphics workstations have rendering performances of more than one million polygons per second in This paper presents a graphics workstation for real­ conjunction with hardware supported transparency, time display of Phong shaded polygons. The applied anti-aliasing, perspective texture mapping, image shading method is based on normal vector compositing, etc. In spite of the fact that great stri...

Rice is an important staple crop throughout the world, but environmental stress like low-light conditions can negatively impact crop yield and quality. Using pot experiments and field experiments, we studied the effects of shading on starch pasting viscosity and starch content with six rice varieties for three years, using the Rapid Visco Analyser to measure starch pasting viscosity. Shading at...