A computer vision system for tracking multiple people in relatively unconstrained environments is described. Tracking is performed at three levels of abstraction: regions, people and groups. A novel, adaptive background subtraction method that combines colour and gradient information is used to cope with shadows and unreliable colour cues. People are tracked through mutual occlusions as they fo...

Abstract Heavy rainfall in extreme climates often causes natural disasters such as floods, landslides, and debris flows. Rainfall-induced slope instabilities are major geological (Glade Environ Geol 35:160–174, 1998; Dai et al. Eng 51:279–290, 1999; Iverson Water Resour Res 36:1897–1910, 2000; Lee Pradhan Landslides 4:33–41, 2007; Li 13:1109–1123, 2016a; Ecol 91:477–486, 2016b; Wu Hydro-mechani...

Oncolytic vaccinia virus (VACV) therapy is an alternative treatment option for glioblastoma multiforme. Here, we used a comparison of different tumor locations and different immunologic and genetic backgrounds to determine the replication efficacy and oncolytic potential of the VACV LIVP 1.1.1, an attenuated wild-type isolate of the Lister strain, in murine GL261 glioma models. With this approa...

We review the search for the top quark conducted by the DØ collaboration using data from the Fermilab pp collider. Based upon a preliminary analysis of an integrated luminosity of about 13.5 pb −1 , we have searched for tt production and decay in the experimental channels involving a pair of dileptons (e or µ) plus jets, or single leptons plus jets. Summed over all channels, we observe 7 events...

The ionizing spectral energy distribution of quasars exhibits a steepening of the distribution short-ward of 1200 Å. The change of the power-law index from approximately −1 to −2 so far has been interpreted as being intrinsic to quasars. We study an alternative interpretation, in which a tenuous absorption screen is responsible for the change of index. We find that the most successful function ...

This paper proposes a feature-based multi-sensor fire detector operating on ordinary video and long wave infrared (LWIR) thermal images. The detector automatically extracts hot objects from the thermal images by dynamic background subtraction and histogram-based segmentation. Analogously, moving objects are extracted from the ordinary video by intensity-based dynamic background subtraction. The...

We propose a variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models. The observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation can be reproduced with natural values of the parameters of the theory and a grand unification scale which is consistent with the unification of the minimal supersymmetric standard model gauge couplings as measu...