This paper describes a method to detect, measure the speed, and extract statistics of boats moving on a wide water surface using a single image stream taken from grayscale camera. The approach is based on a background subtraction technique combined with classification and tracking to improve robustness; it provides a stable detection even with sea waves and strong light reflections. The method ...

OBJECTIVES To examine patterns of disease and injury in people living on boats in Hue City, Vietnam, and their relations to socioeconomic conditions, sanitary practices, disease prevention proficiency, and people's preference to continued living on boats. METHODS The subjects were 3737 people aged 5 years and over living on boats in Hue City, Vietnam. Diseases and injuries were diagnosed acco...

The application of agent methodologies in process monitoring and control is a relatively novel approach, particularly suitable for distributed and dislocated systems. As for marine reservers, access monitoring is aimed at avoiding intrusions of unauthorized boats – also considering that, typically, marine reserves are located in areas not easily accessible. Typical solutions consist of using ra...

Setting up a marine reserve involves access monitoring, with the goal of avoiding intrusions of not authorized boats – also considering that, typically, marine reserves are located in areas not easily accessible. Nowadays, intrusion detection in marine reserves is carried out by using radar systems or suitable cameras activated by movement sensors. In this paper, we present a multiagent system ...

Levels of boat traffic in coastal seas have been steadily increasing many parts the world, introducing pressures on marine wildlife through disturbance. The appropriate management human activities is important not only to preserve wildlife, but also for local communities that depend ecotourism employment and their economy. This study presents further insight into bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops tr...

Non-native invasive species are a major threat to biodiversity, especially in freshwater ecosystems. Freshwater ecosystems are naturally rather isolated from one another. Nonetheless, invasive species often spread rapidly across water sheds. This spread is to a large extent realized by human activities that provide vectors. For example, recreational boats can carry invasive species propagules a...

INTRODUCTION Crew familiarity, in terms of having recent operational experience together as a crew, is seen as an important safety-related variable. However, little evidence exists to unpack the underlying processes with respect to familiarity. This study investigated the relationships between crew familiarity, non-technical performance, and error management. METHOD Data were collected during...

Recent research into use cases advocates guidance in the composition and structuring of their descriptions. For example, the CREWS research project has proposed Use Case Authoring Guidelines. As such, this paper describes an experiment, which compares the utility of use-case writing guidelines, specifically our own (CP) guidelines with those from the CREWS group. Replication of CREWS studies ha...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch program is installing in situ monitoring stations at strategic coral reef areas for purposes of establishing long-term data sets, providing near real-time information products, and surface-truthing NOAA satellite sea surface temperature (SST) products used for coral bleaching predictions ("HotSpots"). The suite of sta...