Rock art is an archaeological term for human-made markings on stone, including carved markings, known as petroglyphs, and painted markings, known as pictographs. It is believed that there are millions of petroglyphs in North America alone, and the study of this valued cultural resource has implications even beyond anthropology and history. Surprisingly, although image processing, information retrieval and data mining have had a large impact on many human endeavors, they have had essentially zero impact on the study of rock art. In this work we identify the reasons for this, and introduce a novel distance measure and algorithms which allow efficient and effective data mining of large collections of rock art.

Subterranean termite nests are located underground and termites forage out by constructing tunnels to reach food resources, and tunneling behavior is critical in order to maximize the foraging efficiency. Excavation, transportation, and deposition behavior are involved in the tunneling, and termites have to move back and forth to do this. Although there are three sequential behaviors, excavation has been the focus of most previous studies. In this study, we investigated the deposition behavior of the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, in experimental arenas having different widths (2, 3, and 4 mm), and characterized the function of deposited particles. We also simulated moving distance of the termites in different functions. Our results showed that total amounts of deposited particles were significantly higher in broad (4 mm width) than narrow (2 mm) tunnels and most deposited particles were observed near the tip of the tunnel regardless of tunnel widths. In addition, we found that deposited particles followed a quadratic decrease function, and simulation results showed that moving distance of termites in this function was the shortest. The quadratic decrease function of deposited particles in both experiment and simulation suggested that short moving distance in the decrease quadratic function is a strategy to minimize moving distance during the deposition behavior.