Morphological basis for the waterproof characteristic of bird plumage

A surface variable, density of water-feather touching points （Dp） was proposed in this paper to express surface property of water repellency of contour feather. Tests in 29 species using breast contour feathers indicated that Dp was small in tericolous species, medium in wading and diving species, large in swimming species, with only a few exceptions. This implied that birds achieve appropriate Dp by optimizing the microstructure of feather to meet the requirement of water repellency. Therefore, Dp was a morphological marker linking structure and function of feather in studies of adaptive evolution of birds.

Accuracy assessment and error analysis for diameter at breast height measurement of trees obtained using a novel backpack LiDAR system

Background: The LiBackpack is a recently developed backpack light detection and ranging(LiDAR) system that combines the flexibility of human walking with the nearby measurement in all directions to provide a novel and efficient approach to LiDAR remote sensing, especially useful for forest structure inventory. However, the measurement accuracy and error sources have not been systematically explored for this system.Method: In this study, we used the LiBackpack D-50 system to measure the diameter at breast height(DBH) for a Pinus sylvestris tree population in the Saihanba National Forest Park of China, and estimated the accuracy of LiBackpack measurements of DBH based on comparisons with manually measured DBH values in the field. We determined the optimal vertical slice thickness of the point cloud sample for achieving the most stable and accurate LiBackpack measurements of DBH for this tree species, and explored the effects of different factors on the measurement error.Result: 1) A vertical thickness of 30 cm for the point cloud sample slice provided the highest fitting accuracy(adjusted R2= 0.89, Root Mean Squared Error(RMSE) = 20.85 mm);2) the point cloud density had a significant negative, logarithmic relationship with measurement error of DBH and it explained 35.1% of the measurement error;3) the LiBackpack measurements of DBH were generally smaller than the manually measured values, and the corresponding measurement errors increased for larger trees;and 4) by considering the effect of the point cloud density correction, a transitional model can be fitted to approximate field measured DBH using LiBackpackscanned value with satisfactory accuracy(adjusted R2= 0.920;RMSE = 14.77 mm), and decrease the predicting error by 29.2%. Our study confirmed the reliability of the novel LiBackpack system in accurate forestry inventory, set up a useful transitional model between scanning data and the traditional manual-measured data specifically for P.sylvestris, and implied the applicable substitution of this new approach for more species, with necessary parameter calibration.

Density‑Based Road Segmentation Algorithm for Point Cloud Collected by Roadside LiDAR

This paper proposes a novel density-based real-time segmentation algorithm,to extract ground point cloud in real time from point cloud data collected by roadside LiDAR.The algorithm solves the problems such as the large amount of original point cloud data collected by LiDAR,which leads to heavy computational burden in ground point search.First,point cloud data is filtered by straight-through filtering method and rasterized to improve the real-time performance of the algorithm.Then,the density of the point cloud in horizontal plane is calculated,and the threshold of the density is selected to extract the low-density regional point cloud according to the density statistical histogram and 95%loci.Finally,the low-density regional point cloud is used as the initial ground seeds for iterative optimization of ground parameters,and the ground point cloud is extracted by the fitted ground model to realize road point cloud extraction.The experimental results on 1055 frames of continuous data collected on real scenes show that the average time consumption of the proposed method is 0.11 s,and the average segmentation precision is 92.48%.This shows that the density-based road segmentation algorithm can reduce the time of point cloud traversal in the process of ground parameter fitting and improve the real-time performance of the algorithm while maintaining the accuracy of ground extraction.

Photoreflectance system based on vacuum ultraviolet laser at 177.3 nm

Photoreflectance(PR)spectroscopy is a powerful and non-destructive experimental technique to explore interband transitions of semiconductors.In most PR systems,the photon energy of the pumping beam is usually chosen to be higher than the bandgap energy of the sample.To the best of our knowledge,the highest energy of pumping laser in reported PR systems is 5.08 eV(244 nm),not yet in the vacuum ultraviolet(VUV)region.In this work,we report the design and construction of a PR system pumped by VUV laser of 7.0 eV(177.3 nm).At the same time,dual-modulated technique is applied and a dual channel lock-in-amplifier is integrated into the system for efficient PR measurement.The system’s performance is verified by the PR spectroscopy measurement of well-studied semiconductors,which testifies its ability to probe critical-point energies of the electronic band in semiconductors from ultraviolet to near-infrared spectral region.

Banach Upper Density Recurrent Points of C^0-flows

Let X denote a compact metric space with distance d and F ： X×R→ X or Ft ： X→X denote a C0-flow. From the point of view of ergodic theory, all important dynamical behaviors take place on a full measure set. The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of Banach upper density recurrent points and to show that the closure of the set of all Banach upper density recurrent points equals the measure center or the minimal center of attraction for a C0-flow. Moreover, we give an example to show that the set of quasi-weakly almost periodic points can be included properly in the set of Banach upper density recurrent points, and point out that the set of Banach upper density recurrent points can be included properly in the set of recurrent points.

Distributional Chaos Occurring on the Set of Proper Positive Upper Banach Density Recurrent Points of One-sided Symbolic Systems

The purpose of this paper is to show that for one-sided symbolic systems,there exists an uncountable distributionally scrambled set contained in the set of proper positive upper Banach density recurrent points.