As we parse the retinal image into different objects, a number of visual properties are used to distinguish figure from ground and one object from neighboring objects. These properties include luminance, color, relative motion, and stereo disparity. Within a single surface there can be variation in surface reflectance, color, or three-dimensional orientation (surface roughness). These variation...

Mapping landscape variation in tree species richness (SR) is essential to the long term management and conservation of forest ecosystems. The current study examines the prospect of mapping field assessments of SR in a high-elevation, deciduous forest in northern Iran as a function of 16 biophysical variables representative of the area's unique physiography, including topography and coastal plac...

The acquisition of substantial dermal sealing determines the prognosis of percutaneous titanium-based medical devices or prostheses. A nano-topographic titanium surface with ordered nano-spikes and pores has been shown to induce periodontal-like connective tissue attachment and activate gingival fibroblastic functions. This in vitro study aimed to determine whether an alkali-heat (AH) treatment...

Elevated forest mortality has been attributed to climate change-induced droughts, but prediction of spatial mortality patterns remains challenging. We evaluated whether introducing plant hydraulics and topographic convergence-induced soil moisture variation to land surface models (LSM) can help explain spatial patterns of mortality. A scheme predicting plant hydraulic safety loss from soil mois...

The solar radiation intercepted at a given location on the earth's surface is influenced by surface orientation and sky obstruction by surrounding topographic features. Viewshed models can be used to calculate sky obstruction for any given location on or above a complex topographic surface. We have developed an algorithm for rapid calculation of intercepted solar radiation using a combination o...

Registration is a primary step in tracking pathological changes in medical images. Point-based registration requires a set of distinct, identifiable and comparable landmark points to be extracted from images. In this work, we illustrate a method for obtaining landmarks based on changes in a topographic descriptor of a retinal image. Building on the curvature primal sketch introduced by Asada an...

Surface water storage is a key component of the terrestrial hydrological and biogeochemical cycles that also plays a major role in water resources management. In this study, surface water storage (SWS) variations are estimated at monthly time-scale over 15 years (1993–2007) using a hypsographic approach based on the combination of topographic information from Advance Spaceborne Thermal Emission...

Topographic analysis systems used to analyse the cornea profile have some limitations due to the aspheric nature of the cornea. In many cases the cornea is modelled by a spherocylindrical surface. However the normal cornea is aspheric and flattened from the center to the periphery. Moreover diseased and postsurgical corneas rarely approximate a spherocylindrical surface. Topographic analysis sy...

Three-dimensional(3D) reconstructions from tilt series in an electron microscope show in general an anisotropic resolution due to an instrumentally limited tilt angle. As a consequence, the information in the z direction is blurred, thus making it difficult to detect the boundary of the reconstructed structures. In contrast, high-resolution topography data from microscopic surface techniques pr...

A topographic surface can be modeled as a graph, a visibility graph in terms of how each point location is visible to every other. This paper demonstrates various structural properties of visibility patterns with a topographic surface from a graph perspective, which could be important for landscape planning. This paper illustrates the fact that the visibility graph with a topographic surface is...