ALBERT

Description: Currently, invasive and external radio frequency identification (RFID) devices and pet tags are widely used for dog identification. However, social problems such as abandoning and losing dogs are constantly increasing. A more effective alternative to the existing identification method is required and the biometrics can be the alternative. This paper proposes an effective dog muzzle recognition method to identify individual dogs. The proposed method consists of preprocessing, feature extraction, matching, and postprocessing. For preprocessing, proposed resize and histogram equalization are used. For feature extraction algorithm, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), Binary Robust Invariant Scaling Keypoints (BRISK) and Oriented FAST, and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) are applied and compared. For matching, Fast Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors (FLANN) is used for SIFT and SURF, and hamming distance are used for BRISK and ORB. For postprocessing, two techniques to reduce incorrect matches are proposed. The proposed method was evaluated with 55 dog muzzle pattern images acquired from 11 dogs and 990 images augmented by the image deformation (i.e., angle, illumination, noise, affine transform). The best Equal Error Rate (EER) of the proposed method was 0.35%, and ORB was the most appropriate for the dog muzzle pattern recognition.

Description: Ammonia (NH3) plays an important role in air quality and atmospheric chemistry, yet studies on the characteristics and impacts of NH3 are limited. Herein, we revealed the spatial distribution of atmospheric NH3, as measured by passive samplers, at three different sites (R1, R2, and R3) in the rural area (livestock environment) of Jeongeup, South Korea, from September 2019 to August 2020. At site R1, the boundary of a large-scale pig farm, dramatically high daily mean concentrations of NH3 were observed (118.7 ppb), whereas sites R2 and R3, located ~1 km from R1, exhibited lower concentrations of 18.2 and 30.4 ppb, respectively. In the rural environment, the monthly NH3 variations showed a peak in June (34.2 ppb), which was significantly higher than in the urban and remote areas. To examine the impact of NH3 from the rural area on a nearby urban area in June 2020, simultaneous measurements were performed using a real-time instrument in Jeonju. When high NH3 events occurred in the urban area in June, the results for the NH3 concentrations and observed meteorological conditions in the rural and urban areas showed that the rural area influenced the NH3 levels in the adjacent urban area.