This paper presents methods for tracking moving objects in an outdoor environment. A robust tracking is achieved using feature fusion and multiple cameras. The proposed method integrates spatial position, shape and color information to track object blobs. The trajectories obtained from individual cameras are incorporated by an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to resolve object occlusion. Our result...

Developing smart house systems has been a great challenge for researchers and engineers in this area because of the high cost of implementation and evaluation process of these systems, while being very time consuming. Testing a designed smart house before actually building it is considered as an obstacle towards an efficient smart house project. This is because of the variety of sensors, home a...

Air pollution health studies often use outdoor concentrations as exposure surrogates. Failure to account for variability of residential infiltration of outdoor pollutants can induce exposure errors and lead to bias and incorrect confidence intervals in health effect estimates. The residential air exchange rate (AER), which is the rate of exchange of indoor air with outdoor air, is an important ...

This article examines the characteristic of affordances of different outdoor environments, related to the influences of children's physical activity levels. Qualitative observation studies in a Norwegian kindergarten were conducted of 3- to 5-year-olds into the natural environment and in the kindergarten's outdoor area. An ecological approach was important from both an analytical and theoretica...

A prospective field study was carried out to investigate any preferential differences of gravid female Aedes mosquitoes in ovipositing their eggs in man-made containers placed in different environmental conditions. The findings of this study show that gravid female Aedes mosquitoes preferred to breed in containers found in the outdoor garden than those placed on the patio and or inside the hous...

This paper presents a vision-based robot homing method capable to deal with a series of dynamic changes in the environment. First we build a robust and stable representation of the goal location using scale invariant features (SIFT) as visual landmarks of the scene, followed by a matching and a voting scheme. We end up with a description that contains the most repetitive features which best rep...

Microclimate in open space affected by the urban layout and spatial forms plays an important role in the outdoor comfort, thus the outdoor activities based on the comfort sensation will directly affected by the spatial forms. An outstanding open space should satisfy different requirements of outdoor activities and create relatively comfortable place.Most studies have been conducted on the...