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In sync with the changing climate, permafrost is undergoing rapid transformations. As temperatures rise, the frozen ground starts to thaw, which has various consequences. Not only does permafrost thawing pose risks to local infrastructure such as roads and buildings, but it also tightly connected to the global climate system by potentially releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere. Distribution of permafrost in the northern hemisphere. (Visualisation based on data from NSICD) ...

Existing approaches for calving front detection generally work by first performing a pixel-wise segmentation or edge detection, and then extract the actual calving front in a post-processing step. Our goal in this study is to build a model that only needs a single step, and directly outputs the calving front as a polyline. Following the idea of explicit contour prediction, we have developed a new method called “Charting Outlines by Recurrent Adaptation” (COBRA). It works by combining the idea of Active Contour models with deep learning. First, a 2D CNN backbone derives feature maps from the input imagery. Then, a 1D CNN (Snake Head) iteratively deforms an initial contour until to match the true contour. ...

Read the full paper on IEEE Xplore.

Read the full paper at Science Direct.

Read the full paper on IEEE Xplore.

Read the full paper on IEEE Xplore.

Have you ever wondered about the rainbows on CDs, gasoline puddles or soap bubbles? All of these have the same cause: The interference of light on thin surfaces. Today, we’ll try to render something that looks like a soap bubble. Some Physics When a ray of light hits the surface of the soap bubble, it is either instantly reflected, or it enters the soap film and is refracted. When it is refracted, it can then be reflected off the other end of the soap, and then leave it again at a slightly different spot. There are countless other possiblities for the ray to bounce around, but these are the two that we will focus on here. ...

A while back on the Geographic Information Systems Subreddit I stumbled upon this question. A user wished to get height information from this elevation map they had found somewhere: Unforunately it has hill-shading applied on top of the color bar. While this shading technique makes it easier to understand the terrain structure at a glance, it also makes it harder to extract the raw height data from the map. So first we’ll have to understand how hill-shading works in order to find a way to get around it. ...

When I was a kid, I really enjoyed this game called Electroplankton. Especially the game mode called Hanenbow, where you launched small tadpoles onto leaves. On impact the leaves would emit glockenspiel sounds, and create a nice sounding melody. Here’s what it looked like: I wondered, how hard could it be to implement something similar? If you just want to see the animation, click here. If you’re interested in the background, read on! ...