There is an increasing need for automated fault detection tools in buildings. The total energy request in buildings can be significantly reduced by detecting abnormal consumption effectively. Numerous models are used to tackle this problem but either they are very complex and mostly applicable to components level, or they cannot be adopted for different buildings and equipment. In this study a ...

Airborne fungi are often collected during the assessment of water-damaged buildings. Air sampling for endotoxin, a characteristic group of constituents of outer membranes of gram-negative bacteria, is another approach commonly used to characterize microbial conditions in buildings. This study presents results of fungal and endotoxin air samples collected in buildings with microbial complaints. ...

In carrying out the thermographical research of buildings, including the conditions to conduct this thermal imagining of buildings, one must take into account a rather small rank of temperature differences between outer surfaces of buildings and their surroundings. This is particularly vital if one compares other types and methods for carrying our thermography survey. In this connection, for th...

Outbreaks of Legionnaire's disease present a public health challenge especially because fatal outcomes still remain frequent. The aim of this study was to describe the abundance and epidemiology of Legionellaceae in the human-made environment. Water was sampled from hot-water taps in private and public buildings across the area of Göttingen, Germany, including distant suburbs. Following isolati...

Buildings are the focus of European (EU) policies aimed at a sustainable and competitive low-carbon economy by 2020. Reducing energy consumption of existing buildings and achieving nearly zero energy buildings (NZEBs) are the core of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the recast of the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD). To comply with these requirements, Member States have ...

Simplification of three-dimensional (3D) buildings is critical to improve the efficiency of visualizing urban environments while ensuring realistic urban scenes. Moreover, it underpins the construction of multi-scale 3D city models (3DCMs) which could be applied to study various urban issues. In this paper, we design a generic yet effective approach for simplifying 3D buildings. Instead of rely...

High-resolution remote sensing images accelerate the development of information extraction and 3D city reconstruction. This paper concentrates on object-oriented methods to solve building extraction problems. With object-oriented methods, not only the spectral information but also the shape, contextual and semantic information can be used to extract objects. The object-oriented building extract...

Energy consumed the in urban sector accounts for a large proportion of total world delivered energy consumption. Residential building energy consumption is an important part of urban energy consumption. However, there are few studies focused on this issue and that have simulated the energy consumption of residential buildings using questionnaire data. In this research, an eQUEST study was condu...

Airborne laser scanning systems generate 3-dimensional point clouds of high density and irregular spacing. These data consist of multiple returns coming from terrain, buildings, and vegetation. The major difficulty is the extraction of object categories, usually buildings. In the field of disaster management, the detection of building damages plays an important role. Therefore, the question ari...