Cooled infrared detector arrays always suffer from undesired ripple residual nonuniformity (RNU) in sky scene observations. The ripple residual nonuniformity seriously affects the imaging quality, especially for small target detection. It is difficult to eliminate it using the calibration-based techniques and the current scene-based nonuniformity algorithms. In this paper, we present a modified temporal high-pass nonuniformity correction algorithm using fuzzy scene classification. The fuzzy scene classification is designed to control the correction threshold so that the algorithm can remove ripple RNU without degrading the scene details. We test the algorithm on a real infrared sequence by comparing it to several well-established methods. The result shows that the algorithm has obvious advantages compared with the tested methods in terms of detail conservation and convergence speed for ripple RNU correction. Furthermore, we display our architecture with a prototype built on a Xilinx Virtex-5 XC5VLX50T field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which has two advantages: (1) low resources consumption; and (2) small hardware delay (less than 10 image rows). It has been successfully applied in an actual system. Full article

A spatial approach that incorporates three economic components and one environmental factor has been developed to evaluate the dynamic behaviours of the rural areas at a provincial level. An artificial fish swarm algorithm with variable population size (AFSAVP) is proposed for the spatial problem. A functional region affecting index θ is employed as a fitness function for the AFSAVP driven optimisation, in which a gross domestic product (GDP) based method is utilised to estimate the CO₂ emission of all provinces. A simulation for the administrative provinces of China has been implemented, and the results have shown that the modelling method based on GDP data can assess the spatial dynamic behaviours and can be taken as an operational tool for the policy planners. Full article