Moving objects may stimulate many retinal photoreceptors within the integration time of the receptors without motion blur being experienced. Anderson and vanEssen (1987) suggested that the neuronal representation of retinal images is shifted on its way to the cortex, in an opposite direction to the motion. Thus, the cortical representation of objects would be stationary. I have measured thresholds for two vernier stimuli, moving simultaneously into opposite directions over identical positions. Motion blur for these stimuli is not stronger than with a single moving stimulus, and thresholds can be below a photoreceptor diameter. This result cannot be easily reconciled with the hypothesis of Tshifter circuitsU.

Groundwater water resources must be accurately characterized in order to be managed sustainably. Due to the cost to install monitoring wells and challenges in collecting and managing in-situ data, groundwater data is sparse in space and time especially in developing countries. In this study we analyzed long-term groundwater storage changes with limited times-series data where each well had only one groundwater measurement in time. We developed methods to synthetically create times-series groundwater table elevation (WTE) by clustering wells with uniform grid and k-means-constrained clustering and creating pseudo wells. Pseudo wells with the WTE values from the cluster-member wells were temporally and spatially interpolated to analyze groundwater changes. We used the methods for the Beryl-Enterprise aquifer in Utah where other researchers quantified the groundwater storage depletion rate in the past, and the methods yielded a similar storage depletion rate. The method was then applied to the southern region in Niger and the result showed a ground water storage change that partially matched with the trend calculated by the GRACE data. With a limited data set that regressions or machine learning did not work, our method captured the groundwater storage trend correctly and can be used for the area where in-situ data is highly limited in time and space.

The diploma thesis deals with registration and analysis of images from the experimental low-cost fundus camera that reaches a low SNR (around 10 dB) and low temporal and spatial resolution. The aim of the diploma tesis is to explore the possibilities of digital processing leading to the creation of a videosequence that has real benefits for medical diagnostics. The well-known program elastix is used for registration. Preprocessing filters and interpolation are implemented in Matlab. The program provides a wide range of setting options, out of which many combinations were tested and evaluated. To assess the accuracy achieved, spatial variations in the detected motion of blood-vessels are evaluated. Best results with a precision below 0.3 px were achieved by using a band-pass filter, a~suitably sized mask, rigid registration and a metric of the mutual information. Test sequences were registered precisely enough both for visual assessment and basic computational analysis. Registered sequences and the developed application that both can be used in the further development of the experimental camera are the main contributions of the diploma thesis.

The monitoring of continuous phenomena like temperature, air pollution, precipitation, soil moisture etc. is of growing importance. Decreasing costs for sensors and associated infrastructure increase the availability of observational data. These data can only rarely be used directly for analysis, but need to be interpolated to cover a region in space and/or time without gaps. So the objective of monitoring in a broader sense is to provide data about the observed phenomenon in such an enhanced form. Notwithstanding the improvements in information and communication technology, monitoring always has to function under limited resources, namely: number of sensors, number of observations, computational capacity, time, data bandwidth, and storage space. To best exploit those limited resources, a monitoring system needs to strive for efficiency concerning sampling, hardware, algorithms, parameters, and storage formats. In that regard, this work proposes and evaluates solutions for several problems associated with the monitoring of continuous phenomena. Synthetic random fields can serve as reference models on which monitoring can be simulated and exactly evaluated. For this purpose, a generator is introduced that can create such fields with arbitrary dynamism and resolution. For efficient sampling, an estimator for the minimum density of observations is derived from the extension and dynamism of the observed field. In order to adapt the interpolation to the given observations, a generic algorithm for the fitting of kriging parameters is set out. A sequential model merging algorithm based on the kriging variance is introduced to mitigate big workloads and also to support subsequent and seamless updates of real-time models by new observations. For efficient storage utilization, a compression method is suggested. It is designed for the specific structure of field observations and supports progressive decompression. The unlimited diversity of possible configurations of the features above calls for an integrated approach for systematic variation and evaluation. A generic tool for organizing and manipulating configurational elements in arbitrary complex hierarchical structures is proposed. Beside the root mean square error (RMSE) as crucial quality indicator, also the computational workload is quantified in a manner that allows an analytical estimation of execution time for different parallel environments. In summary, a powerful framework for the monitoring of continuous phenomena is outlined. With its tools for systematic variation and evaluation it supports continuous efficiency improvement.