BACKGROUND The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) investigated the 17 April 2013 explosion at the West Fertilizer Company (WFC) that resulted in 15 fatalities, more than 260 injuries, and damage to more than 150 buildings. Among these structures were four nearby school buildings cumulatively housing children in grades kindergarten-12, a nursing care facility, and an apart...

Gable roof buildings are widely used in industrial buildings. Based on wind tunnel tests with rigid models, wind pressure distributions on gable roof buildings with different aspect ratios were measured simultaneously. Some characteristics of the measured wind pressure field on the surfaces of the models were analyzed, including mean wind pressure, fluctuating wind pressure, peak negative wind ...

Human operators use an intuitive procedure of rotating laser scanner point clouds into specific projections when trying to understand the structure of buildings contained in the data. This procedure has been formalized and incorporated into an automatic building model reconstruction procedure. The method derives the building orientation from the analysis of height histogram bins. Using the orie...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of large number of sensor nodes. These nodes are distributed in a particular area for the purpose of collecting data/queries etc. WSNs have played an important role in applications such as industrial automation, smart buildings and intrusion detection so on. On the basis of energy efficiency, overhead and data delivery performance, WSN MAC is divided into...

Over the past thirty years, the concept of cultural heritage has been continually broadened. The Venice Charter (1964) made reference to “monuments and sites” and dealt with architectural heritage. The question rapidly expanded to cover groups of buildings, vernacular architecture, and industrial and 20th century built heritage. Over and above the study of historic gardens, the concept of “cult...

Being with many advantages such as environmental protection, controllable, facilitate measurement etc, electric heating has been promoted actively in some places. For public buildings with huge energy consumption, electric heating intelligent controlling may be the key to achieve energy conservation. In this paper, visual distributed control system (DCS) was presented in electric heating of the...

Lately, wireless networks have gained acceptance for home networking. Low cost installation, flexibility and no fixed infrastructures have made it possible home environments rapidly to adopt this technology. In this paper we introduce the use of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) for large in-home environments, such as hospitals, government buildings, office and industrial buildings, etc. Thus, we...

Human observers perceive man-made objects in images from the visual spectrum domain as well as in IR or SAR imagery. Mechanisms like perceptual grouping are crucial to this capability. In this paper two examples for grouping in different image sources are discussed. The first example is activity estimation in urban areas from thermal IR images. The grouping of vehicles into rows is performed al...