Leonardo's Civil Bridges

Within both aesthetic and history fields, civil engineering occupies a privileged place among arts whose manifestations are based on drawing. In this work, Leonardo’s creativity concerned with civil bridges proyects, have been studied. Leonardo designed ten bridges: eight of them intended for military porposes and only two were purely planned for civil functionaly - “Ponte sul corno d’oro”, infolio 66, manuscript L; and “Ponte a due piani”, represented in the Manuscript B at the Institute of France, infolio 23. There can be no doubt about Leonardo’s intentions when he started on designing these two bridges: his genious for creativy focused on providing both singulary and functionaly to the structures: they should be admired and utilized at the same time, a monument for civil society to be used.The work presented here attemps to make an scientist-historical trip along these Leonardo’s bridges, highlighting their technical, geometrical and aesthetic characteristics, as well as emphasizing Leonardo’s human, scientist and artistic nature.

Multisensor data fusion for accurate modelling of mobile objects

In the last decade, multi-sensor data fusion has become a broadly demanded discipline to achieve advanced solutions that can be applied in many real world situations, either civil or military. In Defence,accurate detection of all target objects is fundamental to maintaining situational awareness, to locating threats in the battlefield and to identifying and protecting strategically own forces. Civil applications, such as traffic monitoring, have similar requirements in terms of object detection and reliable identification of incidents in order to ensure safety of road users. Thanks to the appropriate data fusion technique, we can give these systems the power to exploit automatically all relevant information from multiple sources to face for instance mission needs or assess daily supervision operations. This paper focuses on its application to active vehicle monitoring in a particular area of high density traffic, and how it is redirecting the research activities being carried out in the computer vision, signal processing and machine learning fields for improving the effectiveness of detection and tracking in ground surveillance scenarios in general. Specifically, our system proposes fusion of data at a feature level which is extracted from a video camera and a laser scanner. In addition, a stochastic-based tracking which introduces some particle filters into the model to deal with uncertainty due to occlusions and improve the previous detection output is presented in this paper. It has been shown that this computer vision tracker contributes to detect objects even under poor visual information. Finally, in the same way that humans are able to analyze both temporal and spatial relations among items in the scene to associate them a meaning, once the targets objects have been correctly detected and tracked, it is desired that machines can provide a trustworthy description of what is happening in the scene under surveillance. Accomplishing so ambitious task requires a machine learning-based hierarchic architecture able to extract and analyse behaviours at different abstraction levels. A real experimental testbed has been implemented for the evaluation of the proposed modular system. Such scenario is a closed circuit where real traffic situations can be simulated. First results have shown the strength of the proposed system.

Aplicación de nuevas tecnologías en la Arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española: Los Yesares, Pinto (Madrid. Application of new technologies in archeology of the Civil War:The Yesares, Pinto (Madrid.

ABSTRACT: The surveys carried out in the municipality of Pinto (Madrid) have enabled us to locate various structural remains linked to the military operations that took place around the capital during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In order to identify and record them, surveys were complemented with the use of GPS and air photographs from different time periods. Afterwards, and in collaboration with researchers from various universities, further methods aimed at generating a complete special representation of the area were applied directly to one of the sites which produced the best results, known as "los Yesares". These methods include topographic mapping that resulted in cartographic material at different scales, the photographic recording with flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and the use of land scanners and GPS-corrected photogrammetrics with which to obtain 3D models.