The purpose of this paper is to integrate the concepts of ecosystem services and disservices when assessing the efficacy of using urban forests for mitigating pollution. A brief review of the literature identifies some pollution mitigation ecosystem services provided by urban forests. Existing ecosystem services definitions and typologies from the economics and ecological literature are adapted...

Advantages of urbanization such as access to clean water, health, and overall easier life in cities, as well as the disadvantages or its negative effects on environment cannot be ignored. Today, there are numerous environmental problems due to the reduction in ecologically valuable places within urban areas. Bringing nature to the cities appears to be essential to enhance urban environment and ...

We present a real-time approach for circular and polygonal road signs detection in still images, regardless of their pose and orientation. Object detection is performed using a Hough like transform based on accumulation on pairs of points with their gradients. Circular and polygonal (non triangular) traffic signs are detected by the so-called Bilateral Chinese Transform BCT. Triangular traffic ...

urban landscape structural analysis; focused on the remnant patch mosaic network as the component with closest interdependency with air and water related processes was undertaken to find and propose environmental planning suggestions.assessments demonstrate that remnant patch mosaic network structure of tehran is still restorable. with appropriate corrective measures based on the natural lay ou...

This study examines the visual aesthetic function of English signs in line with ethnographic approaches as a means of achieving various symbolic and communicative implications in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Jordan. Having coded the data in 6 urban streets of the major Jordanian cities, the social semiotic analysis centers on the visual layout of signs based on the typographical features of...

The impressive results of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge showed that fully autonomous vehicles are technologically feasible with current intelligent vehicle hardware. It is natural to ask how current transportation infrastructure can be improved when most vehicles are driven autonomously in the future. Dresner and Stone proposed a new intersection control mechanism called Autonomous Intersectio...

* 0-7803-7952-7/03/$17.00  2003 IEEE. Abstract – With all of the textual indications, messages and signs we find in urban settings to provide us with all types of information, it is only natural that we try to give to robots reading capabilities of interpreting such information. Equipped with optical character recognition algorithms, a mobile robot has to face the challenge of controlling its ...