Convection over the building envelope is a critical determinant of building cooling load, but parameterization of convection in building energy models and urban computational fluid dynamics models is challenging. An experimental investigation intended to clarify the heat transfer mechanism of a convective wall boundary layer (WBL) on a leeward, vertical building wall was conducted at the Compre...

For the Wayfarer Project, funded by the US Army through TARDEC, we have developed technologies that enable manportable PackBot Wayfarer UGVs to perform autonomous reconnaissance in urban terrain. Each Wayfarer UGV can autonomously follow urban streets and building perimeters while avoiding obstacles and building a map of the terrain. Each UGV is equipped with a 3D stereo vision system, a 360-de...

The goal of this paper is to extract automatically the building contours regardless of shape. By extracting these contours, detection results will be more accurate, giving useful information about urban area, which is important for many tasks, like map updating and disaster management. First, we extract local feature points from the image, based on a modification of Harris detector’s saliency f...

Urban parks provide important environmental, social, and economic benefits to people and urban areas. The literature demonstrates that proximity to urban parks is one of the key factors influencing people's willingness to use them. Therefore, the provision of urban parks near residential areas and workplaces is one of the key factors influencing quality of life. This study designed a solution b...

In recent years, the issue of energy consumption modeling techniques in the building sector has been widely considered by researchers and managers. Researches indicate that energy consumption in residential sector is one of the main parts of the total consumption. Moreover, the urban residence is supposed as a significant consumer of energy in every country and therefore a focus for energy cons...

Visualization of city scenes is important for many applications including entertainment and urban mission planning. Models covering wide areas can be efficiently constructed from aerial images. However, only roof details are visible from aerial views; ground views are needed to provide details of the building facades for high quality ’fly-through’ visualization or simulation applications. We pr...

Visualization of city scenes is important for many applications including entertainment and urban mission planning. Models covering wide areas can be efficiently constructed from aerial images. However, only roof details are visible from aerial views; ground views are needed to provide details of the building facades for high quality ’fly-through’ visualization or simulation applications. We pr...

The increasing popularity of parametric design tools goes hand in hand with the use of building performance simulation (BPS) tools from the early design phase. However, current methods require a significant computational time and a high number of parameters as input, as they are based on traditional BPS tools conceived for detailed building design phase. Their application to the urban scale is ...

‘Urban villages’ is the Chinese version of informal settlement. It is a unique phenomenon that comprises mainly low-rise and congested, often illegal buildings surrounded by new constructions and high-rise buildings. Due to a lack of an unambiguous definition allowing for a spatial delineation of such areas, this article investigates a joint use of high-resolution optical and SAR satellite data...