Segmentation of buildings in urban areas, especially dense urban areas, by using remotely sensed images is highly desirable. However, segmentation results obtained by using existing algorithms are unsatisfactory because of the unclear boundaries between buildings and the shadows cast by neighboring buildings. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed that successfully segments buildings from aeri...

Many sensors/meters are deployed in commercial buildings to monitor and optimize their performance. However, because sensor metadata is inconsistent across buildings, softwarebased solutions are tightly coupled to the sensor metadata conventions (i.e. schemas and naming) for each building. Running the same software across buildings requires significant integration effort. Metadata normalization...

Building fire puts great threat on people’s lives and causes huge numbers of fatalities each year. In 2007, total fire death in the United States alone was 3,430. The number of fatalities is distributed among residential 75.5%, non-residential 3.6%, vehicle 16.7%, outside 1.6%, and other 2.6%. Although much research has been done on building fire simulation to support designing safer buildings,...

This paper summarizes the results of a large indoor environmental quality survey in office buildings, comparing green with non-green buildings. On average, occupants in green buildings were more satisfied with thermal comfort and air quality in their workspace. However, the average satisfaction scores in green buildings for lighting and acoustic quality were comparable to the non-green average....

The behavior of the building and real estate sectors is quite important in matters of environmental sustainability. It is reported, for example, that buildings account for approximately 40 percent of the consumption of raw materials and energy. In addition, 55 percent of the wood that is not used for fuel is consumed in construction. Overall, buildings and their associated construction activity...

Non intrusive load monitoring (NILM), or energy disaggregation, is the process of separating the total electricity consumption of a building as measured at single point into the building’s constituent loads. Previous research in the field has mostly focused on residential buildings, and although the potential benefits of applying this technology to commercial buildings have been recognised sinc...

Abstract: In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for automatically generating three-dimensional (3D) building models in dense urban areas. Automatic 3D building modeling in dense urban areas is challenging because, especially in Japan, houses that have slant roofs are located close to each other, and their heights are similar. For this case, difficulty in separating point clouds into individua...

Americans spend much of their days in buildings, yet relatively little is known about how the design of buildings or their site influences physical activity. Although some evidence suggests that using specific features of buildings and their immediate surroundings such as stairs can have a meaningful impact on health, the influences of the physical environment on physical activity at the buildi...

Existing automatic building extraction methods are not effective in extracting buildings which are small in size and have transparent roofs. The application of large area threshold prohibits detection of small buildings and the use of ground points in generating the building mask prevents detection of transparent buildings. In addition, the existing methods use numerous parameters to extract bu...

Recent work has produced a theory for tropical convective available potential energy (CAPE) that highlights the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) scaling of the atmosphere’s saturation deficit as a driver of increases in CAPE with warming. Here we test this so-called “zero-buoyancy” theory for CAPE by modulating the saturation deficit of cloud-resolving simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium in ...