Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) is a critical physical quantity that indicates how human beings experience radiation in their surrounding environment. If taken outdoors, MRT depends on the temperature of the sky, ground, vegetation and surrounding buildings, and is therefore difficult to predict reliably. An additional challenge for designers is that publically available simulation tools do not ...

In outdoor environments one of the most important and informative attributes is the elevation: the height of a geographic location above the sea level. However, almost all currently available photos and videos lack elevation information. Moreover, a majority of them do not even contain the GPS coordinates. This work addresses the problem of camera elevation estimation from visual information co...

This paper describes recent work on a neural network approach to outdoor scene interpretation. The results of evaluating a range of automatic region-based segmentation techniques based on a new segmentation quality metric are presented. The optimal technique is used to segment images of natural outdoor scenes. A powerful set of features designed for outdoor scene analysis is extracted from regi...

The thermal environment outdoors affects human comfort and health. Mental and physical performance is reduced at high levels of air temperature being a problem especially in tropical climates. This paper deals with human comfort in the warm-humid city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The main aim was to examine the influence of urban micrometeorological conditions on people's subjective thermal perceptio...

We explored whether spectral based cues, such as extremal edges, are useful for border ownership classification in real images, and we analyzed how different environments: indoor vs. outdoor affect the prediction. Our algorithmic approach is based on a random forest classifier using spectral and Gestalt-like texture grouping features. The classifier detects in real-time the points in the image,...

Thermal comfort under non-steady-state conditions primarily deals with rapid environmental transients and significant alterations of the meteorological conditions, activity, or clothing pattern within the time scale of some minutes. In such cases, thermal history plays an important role in respect to time, and thus, a dynamic approach is appropriate. The present study aims to investigate the dy...

from building design point of view a basic aim of low energy architecture is to create a thermally comfortable internal environment for building occupants whilst consuming the least possible amount of energy. thus, thermal comfort study has an important impact on energy saving. achieving comfort conditions requires an understanding of the interaction between three groups of factors, namely phys...

Models for human perception of thermal environments included in so-called thermal comfort standards are either based on principles of thermal heat balance, or on large empirical datasets that include human adaptations to different thermal environments (i.e. so-called adaptive approach). The framework for an adaptive thermal heat balance model (ATHB) combines these 2 approaches, improves the pre...