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Accidental fall is the most prominent factor that causes the accidental death of elder people due to their slow body reaction. Automatic fall detection technology integrated in a health-care system can assist human monitoring the occurrence of fall, especially in dusky environments. In this paper, a novel fall detection system focusing mainly on dusky environments is proposed. In dusky environments, the silhouette images of human bodies extracted from conventional CCD cameras are usually imperfect due to the abrupt change of illumination. Thus, our work adopts a thermal imager to detect human bodies. The proposed approach adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy. Firstly, the downward optical flow features are extracted from the thermal images to identify fall-like actions in the coarse stage. The horizontal projection of motion history images (MHI) extracted from fall-like actions are then designed to verify the incident by the proposed nearest neighbor feature line embedding (NNFLE) in the fine stage. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can distinguish the fall incidents with high accuracy even in dusky environments and overlapping situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new behavior classification system to analyze human movements around a view circle using time-order similarity distributions. To maintain the view in-variance, an action is represented not only from its spatial domain but also its temporal domain. After that, a novel alignment scheme is proposed for aligning each action to a fixed view. With the best view, the task of behavior analysis becomes a string matching problem. One novel idea proposed in this paper is to code a posture using not only its best matched key posture but also other unmatched key postures to form various similarity distributions. Then, recognition of two actions becomes a problem of matching two time-order distributions which can be very effectively solved by comparing their KL distance via a dynamic programming scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, we investigated hot carrier distributions in semiconductor cadmium selenide quantum dots. The relaxation processes represent the behavior of an ensemble of QDs. This concept is applied for analysis with the Fermi-Dirac distribution and relaxation processes among different electron-hole pair states. By extracting the experimental hot carrier distribution and fitting with the Fermi-Dirac function, we resolved the rapid thermalization processes, such as carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon interactions was resolved within one picosecond upon photoexcitation. The analysis, using the Fermi-Dirac distribution modulated by the density of states, provides a general route to understanding the carrier cooling and heat dissipation processes in quantum dot-based systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over half a century, alternating electric fields have been used to induce particle transport, furnishing the ζ-potential of analytes with sizes ranging from a few nanometers to several micrometers. Concurrent advances in nanotechnology have provided new materials for catalysis, self-assembly, and biomedical applications, all of which benefit from a thorough understanding of particle surface charge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-lying Rydberg states of vinyl bromide at 70000–79500 cm−1 have been investigated using 2+1 resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) spectroscopy. Seven Rydberg series, including one s, three p, two d, and one f, have been identified from fitting the term values of observed electronic states to Rydberg formula rendering the ionization energy of 79194±17 cm−1 (9.819±0.002 eV). All of the seven series converge to the same ionization-energy limit, corresponding to the ground state of vinyl bromide cation. The adiabatic ionization energy of vinyl bromide determined from this study is in excellent agreement with the values reported recently by other methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper proposes a novel dynamic sparsity-based classification scheme to analyze various interaction actions between persons. To address the occlusion problem, this paper represents an action in an over-complete dictionary to makes errors (caused by lighting changes or occlusions) sparsely appear in the training library if the error cases are well collected. Because of this sparsity, it is robust to occlusions and lighting changes. In addition, a novel Hamming distance classification (HDC) scheme is proposed to classify action events to various types. Because the nature of Hamming code is highly tolerant to noise, the HDC scheme is also robust to environmental changes. The difficulty of complicated action modeling can be easily tackled by adding more examples to the over-complete dictionary. More importantly, the HDC scheme is very efficient and suitable for real-time applications because no minimization process is involved to calculate the reconstruction error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel system to analyze human-object interaction events happening between hands and faces in real time. Two challenging problems in this event analysis must be addressed, i.e. , there is no prior knowledge (like shape, color, size, and texture) about the handheld objects, and there are large spatial–temporal variations in event representation. For the first challenge, a novel ratio histogram is proposed to find important color bins to locate handheld objects and their trajectories via a code book technique. This scheme is different from other boosted methods which require very time-consuming estimations to search reliable body configurations. For the second challenge, a mixture of HMMs is proposed to describe an event not only from its dynamic context but also its multiplicity context. It can be performed in real time because an exhaustive search process is avoided to find possible interaction pairs between objects and body parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mangroves are grown in intertidal zones along tropical and subtropical climate areas, which have many benefits for humans and ecosystems. The knowledge of mangrove conditions is essential to know the statuses of mangroves. Recently, satellite imagery has been widely used to generate mangrove and degradation mapping. Sentinel-2 is a volume of free satellite image data that has a temporal resolution of 5 days. When Hurricane Irma hit the southwest Florida coastal zone in 2017, it caused mangrove degradation. The relationship of satellite images between pre and post-hurricane events can provide a deeper understanding of the degraded mangrove areas that were affected by Hurricane Irma. This study proposed an MDPrePost-Net that considers images before and after hurricanes to classify non-mangrove, intact/healthy mangroves, and degraded mangroves classes affected by Hurricane Irma in southwest Florida using Sentinel-2 data. MDPrePost-Net is an end-to-end fully convolutional network (FCN) that consists of two main sub-models. The first sub-model is a pre-post deep feature extractor used to extract the spatial–spectral–temporal relationship between the pre, post, and mangrove conditions after the hurricane from the satellite images and the second sub-model is an FCN classifier as the classification part from extracted spatial–spectral–temporal deep features. Experimental results show that the accuracy and Intersection over Union (IoU) score by the proposed MDPrePost-Net for degraded mangrove are 98.25% and 96.82%, respectively. Based on the experimental results, MDPrePost-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art FCN models (e.g., U-Net, LinkNet, FPN, and FC-DenseNet) in terms of accuracy metrics. In addition, this study found that 26.64% (41,008.66 Ha) of the mangrove area was degraded due to Hurricane Irma along the southwest Florida coastal zone and the other 73.36% (112,924.70 Ha) mangrove area remained intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar automatic target recognition is a critical research topic in radar signal processing. Radar high-resolution range profiles (HRRPs) describe the radar characteristics of a target, that is, the characteristics of the target that is reflected by the microwave emitted by the radar are implicit in it. In conventional radar HRRP target recognition methods, prior knowledge of the radar is necessary for target recognition. The application of deep-learning methods in HRRPs began in recent years, and most of them are convolutional neural network (CNN) and its variants, and recurrent neural network (RNN) and the combination of RNN and CNN are relatively rarely used. The continuous pulses emitted by the radar hit the ship target, and the received HRRPs of the reflected wave seem to provide the geometric characteristics of the ship target structure. When the radar pulses are transmitted to the ship, different positions on the ship have different structures, so each range cell of the echo reflected in the HRRP will be different, and adjacent structures should also have continuous relational characteristics. This inspired the authors to propose a model to concatenate the features extracted by the two-channel CNN with bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). Various filters are used in two-channel CNN to extract deep features and fed into the following BiLSTM. The BiLSTM model can effectively capture long-distance dependence, because BiLSTM can be trained to retain critical information and achieve two-way timing dependence. Therefore, the two-way spatial relationship between adjacent range cells can be used to obtain excellent recognition performance. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method is robust and effective for ship recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]