The correction of non-uniform illumination and the elimination of shading artifacts is an important preprocessing task used in a great number of image processing applications such as segmentation, registration or quantitative analysis. Although, a careful and accurate set up of the image acquisition system may degrade the importance of a brightness normalization algorithm, non-uniform illuminat...

Due to energetic and natural lighting factors, building facades often present external shading devices, but the acoustic properties of such devices have not yet been well studied. This study was carried out using a full-scale model of a portion of a shading device, in a semi-anechoic chamber, using traditional and sound absorbing louvres. The psychoacoustic effects produced by the shading syste...

The pattern of illumination on an undulating surface can be used to infer its 3-D form (shape-from-shading). But the recovery of shape would be invalid if the luminance changes actually arose from changes in reflectance. So how does vision distinguish variation in illumination from variation in reflectance to avoid illusory depth? When a corrugated surface is painted with an albedo texture, the...

In order for using building simulation tools, validation of building simulation should be evaluated. Integrated Environmental Solution (IES) is an environmental design tool which couples an intuitive 3-dimensional modeling interface with extensive performance analysis function covering different criteria such as day lighting, heat gain and energy. The validity of IES ha...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Recent studies have suggested that responses to shading gradients may play an important role in establishment success of exotic plants, but hitherto few studies have tested this. Therefore, a common-garden experiment was conducted using multiple Asian woody plant species that were introduced to Europe >100 years ago in order to test whether naturalized and non-naturalized sp...

This article proposes a rigorous and realistic solution of the Lambertian Shape From Shading (SFS) problem. The power of our approach is threefolds. First, our work is based on a rigorous mathematical method: we define a new notion of weak solutions (in the viscosity sense) which does not necessarily requires boundary data (contrary to the work of [28, 27, 26, 4, 11]) and which allows to define...