Detailed knowledge of nearshore topography and bathymetry is required for a wide variety of purposes, including ecosystem protection, coastal management, and flood and erosion monitoring and research, among others. Both topography and bathymetry are usually studied separately; however, many scientific questions and challenges require an integrated approach. LiDAR technology is often the preferred data source for the generation of topobathymetric models, but because of its high cost, it is necessary to exploit other data sources. In this regard, the main goal of this study was to present a methodological proposal to generate a topobathymetric model, using low-cost unmanned platforms (unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned surface vessel) in a very shallow/shallow and turbid tidal environment (Bahía Blanca estuary, Argentina). Moreover, a cross-analysis of the topobathymetric and the tide level data was conducted, to provide a classification of hydrogeomorphic zones. As a main result, a continuous terrain model was built, with a spatial resolution of approximately 0.08 m (topography) and 0.50 m (bathymetry). Concerning the structure from motion-derived topography, the accuracy gave a root mean square error of 0.09 m for the vertical plane. The best interpolated bathymetry (inverse distance weighting method), which was aligned to the topography (as reference), showed a root mean square error of 0.18 m (in average) and a mean absolute error of 0.05 m. The final topobathymetric model showed an adequate representation of the terrain, making it well suited for examining many landforms. This study helps to confirm the potential for remote sensing of shallow tidal environments by demonstrating how the data source heterogeneity can be exploited.

Accurate gathering of phenotypic information is a key aspect in several subject matters, including biometrics, biomedical analysis, forensics, and many other. Automatic identification of anatomical structures of biometric interest, such as fingerprints, iris patterns, or facial traits, are extensively used in applications like access control and anthropological research, all having in common the drawback of requiring intrusive means for acquiring the required information. In this regard, the ear structure has multiple advantages. Not only the ear's biometric markers can be easily captured from the distance with non intrusive methods, but also they experiment almost no changes over time, and are not influenced by facial expressions. Here we present a new method based on Geometric Morphometrics and Deep Learning for automatic ear detection and feature extraction in the form of landmarks. A convolutional neural network was trained with a set of manually landmarked examples. The network is able to provide morphometric landmarks on ears' images automatically, with a performance that matches human landmarking. The feasibility of using ear landmarks as feature vectors opens a novel spectrum of biometrics applications.

Radial charts are generally considered less effective than linear charts. Perhaps the only exception is in visualizing periodical time-dependent data, which is believed to be naturally supported by the radial layout. It has been demonstrated that the drawbacks of radial charts outweigh the benefits of this natural mapping. Visualization of daily patterns, as a special case, has not been systematically evaluated using radial charts. In contrast to yearly or weekly recurrent trends, the analysis of daily patterns on a radial chart may benefit from our trained skill on reading radial clocks that are ubiquitous in our culture. In a crowd-sourced experiment with 92 non-expert users, we evaluated the accuracy, efficiency, and subjective ratings of radial and linear charts for visualizing daily traffic accident patterns. We systematically compared juxtaposed 12-hours variants and single 24-hours variants for both layouts in four low-level tasks and one high-level interpretation task. Our results show that over all tasks, the most elementary 24-hours linear bar chart is most accurate and efficient and is also preferred by the users. This provides strong evidence for the use of linear layouts - even for visualizing periodical daily patterns.