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Studies in Systems, Decision and Control 192
Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

Samaneh Shahbazi
Nashid Nabian
Computer Vision and

Audition in Urban
Analysis Using the
Remorph Framework
Studies in Systems, Decision and Control
Volume 192
Series editor
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
e-mail: kacprzyk@ibspan.waw.pl
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13304

Mohammad Ali Nematollahi
Samaneh Shahbazi Nashid Nabian
•
Computer Vision
and Audition in Urban
Analysis Using the Remorph
Framework
123
Mohammad Ali Nematollahi Nashid Nabian
Tehran Urban Innovation Center (TUIC) Tehran Urban Innovation Center (TUIC)
Tehran, Iran Tehran, Iran
Samaneh Shahbazi
Tehran Urban Innovation Center (TUIC)
Tehran, Iran
ISSN 2198-4182 ISSN 2198-4190 (electronic)

Studies in Systems, Decision and Control
ISBN 978-981-13-3542-6 ISBN 978-981-13-3543-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3543-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963031
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

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Preface
Heterogeneous, dynamic, multi-layer, and complex network structures of cities are

challenging architects and urban scientists when it comes to understanding, pre-
dicting, planning, and designing the urban environment.
To understand complex urban systems applying AI technologies is going to be
inevitable. Among many possible computational solutions, this book is focused on
practical aspects of computer vision and computer audition as analytical tools for
registration and understanding of urban phenomena.
To best of our knowledge, this book might be the first multidisciplinary effort
between urban scientists and AI experts to qualitatively and qualitatively decode
and better understand urban dynamics.
The book builds on the outcome of a series of workshops targeting under-
standing the space of the city using computer vision and audition. Coined as
Remorph workshops, the series followed a pedagogical framework tailored for
post-graduate researchers, interested in matters pertaining to urban studies.
This book is written to cover possible applications of computer vision and
computer audition in urban studies and, it is suitable for beginners who don’t have
any information about AI concepts. Its technical language would be simple for
architects, urban planners and urban designers with no prior knowledge in computer
vision and audition.
Overall concepts and application techniques for computer vision and audition are
discussed in separate chapters. As such, the book is structured and organized in such
a way that readers can choose to focus on standalone chapters that are of interest to
their research agenda. In each chapter, references are provided for further studies.
Although the authors have tried to provide an expansive classification of tech-
niques and trends in the beginning of each chapter, they declare that there is always a
possibility for improvement of the provided classifications. Therefore, suggestions
from audience for enhancing the book’s structure and content will be most welcomed.
Tehran, Iran Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

September 2018 Samaneh Shahbazi
Nashid Nabian
vii
Acknowledgements
We would like to record my gratitude to our editors Dr. Loyola DSilva and Mr. Ravi
Vengadachalam for their guidance, advice, and continuous support during the entire
course of this book.
We also would like to express our special thanks to Tehran Urban Innovation
Center (TUIC) for providing a beautiful, peaceful, and calm academic environment
for research and study that went to production of this book.
Tehran, Iran Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

September 2018 Samaneh Shahbazi
Nashid Nabian
ix
About This Book
Remorph: A Framework for Application of Computer

Vision and Audition in Urban Analysis
Artificial Intelligent (AI) is being adopted by all scientific disciplines. However, due
to conservative nature of disciplines that are engaged with spatial practices,
including architecture, urban design and urban planning, adapting theories of AI
including computer vision and computer audition has been a challenge to this day.
This book is a try in overcoming this challenge using a conceptual framework,
which is merging computer vision and audition to urban studies based on the
outcome of a series of workshops, called, Remorph, developed and ran by Tehran
Urban Innovation Center (TUIC), between September 2017 and June 2018.
The book covers high level concepts, applications and techniques and theoretical
discussions of computer vision and audition as they can relate to urban studies and
analysis of urban built form. In conclusion of the book, a future trend of “Smart”
urban analysis is discussed.
August 2018 Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

Samaneh Shahbazi
Nashid Nabian
xi
Contents
1 Application of AI in Urban Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Book Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3 Situating the Question in the General Field of Inquiry . . . . . . . . 2
1.4 Remorph as an Analytical Tool for Urban Studies . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4.1 Computer Vision and Its Application in Urban Planning
and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 5
1.4.2 A Brief History of Computer Audition and Its
Application in Urban Planning and Design . . . . . . . . . .. 7
1.4.3 A Brief History of Data Visualization in Urban Planning
and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 9
1.4.4 A Brief History of City as a Cybernetic Mechanism
and Application of Data-Driven Analysis in Urban
Planning and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 11
2 Computer Audition in Urban Studies: Theory, Techniques
and Rules of Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 13
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 13
2.2 Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 14
2.3 Finding a Question, Identifying Perfect Strategy of Auditory
Data Collection and Urban Sonification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.3.1 Single Sensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3.2 Multi Array of Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3.3 Pointwise Sound Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.3.4 Linear Sound Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.4 Understanding Theory, Techniques and Rules of Producing
Urban Soundscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 19
2.4.1 Spatial Soundscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 21
2.4.2 Temporal Soundscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 21
2.5 Understanding Theory, Techniques and Rules of Audio-
Metrication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 21
xiii
xiv Contents
2.5.1 Pitch Extraction Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 22

2.5.2 Melody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 25
2.5.3 Spectrogram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 25
2.6 Understanding Theory, Techniques and Rules of Soundscape
Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 25
2.7 Understanding Theory, Techniques and Rules of Sound-Scape
Representation (Citygrams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.7.1 Preprocessing Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.7.2 Acoustic Feature Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.7.3 Acoustic Feature Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.8 Urban Audio Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.9 Audio Segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.10 Audio Classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.11 Melodification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.12 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3 Computer Vision in Urban Studies: Theory, Techniques and Rules
of Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.2 Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.3 What Is Computer Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.4 Brief History of Computer Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3.5 Introduction to Various Techniques of Computer Vision . . . . . . . 44
3.5.1 Blob Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.5.2 Shape Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.5.3 Color Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.5.4 Tracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.5.5 Size Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.5.6 Identity Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.5.7 Filtering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.6 Kmeans Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.7 Overall Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.7.1 Green Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.7.2 Road (Network) Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.7.3 Water Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3.7.4 Desert Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.7.5 Built-Up Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.7.6 Skyline Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4 Remorph Is a Pedagogical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 85
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 85
4.2 Introducing the Structure of a Remorph Workshops . . . . . . .... 86
4.3 Remorph01: Urban Melodies (Application of the Computer
Audition in Urban Planning and Design) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 88
Contents xv
4.3.1 Data Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 88

4.3.2 Visualization and Melodification of Data . . . . . . . . . . ... 90
4.3.3 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 91
4.4 Remorph02: Urban Processing (Application of the Computer
Vision in Urban Planning and Design) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.4.1 Data Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.4.2 Data Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
4.4.3 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
About the Authors
Dr. Mohammad Ali Nematollahi was born in 1986 in Shiraz, Iran. He received
his B.S. in computer engineering (software) from Yazd University, Iran in 2008.
He completed his master’s degree in computer engineering (software) at the Islamic
Azad University (IAU), Dubai, UAE in 2011. He holds a Ph.D. in computer and
embedded systems engineering from University Putra Malaysia (UPM) in 2015.
He also served as a Post-doctoral fellow at National Electronic and Computer
Technology Center (NECTEC) in 2016. Currently, he is teaching several post-
graduate courses and supervising some master thesis in IAU as assistant professor.
He has published a book and numerous articles in international journals. His
research interests include digital signal/image processing and digital watermarking.
He currently works as a Post-doctorate fellowship in smart city at the Tehran Urban
Innovation Center (TUIC).
e-mail: greencomputinguae@gmail.com
Samaneh Shahbazi was born in Tehran (Iran) and studied her B.Sc. of Architecture
at IAU of Qazvin-Iran. She has started her professional career from 2009 in different
companies. She has completed her M.Sc. of Sustainable Architecture at the
University of Politecnico di Milano and graduated with honors in 2016. During her
studies, she was the winner of MI/Arch-2014 architecture festival at Politecnico di
Milano and she gained the certificate of the “VIP Review” in urban renovation
regarding its subtle, detailed urban designing, and landscape qualities from failed
architecture (fa), a Dutch company. Since 2016, she has started her research on
Remorph theory at Tehran Urban Innovation Center (TUIC). Remorph is based on a
new approach in reading, visualizing the city through its hidden layers. Her research
interests include smart cities, high-tech design, urban soundscape, and urban liv-
ability measurements. She also coordinated different workshops at TUIC w.r.t the
idea of the Remorph.
e-mail: shahbazi.samane@gmail.com
xvii
xviii About the Authors
Dr. Nashid Nabian has a master of architecture degree from Shahid Beheshti
University, a master of urban design from University of Toronto, a doctoral degree
from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has completed a post-doctoral fel-
lowship at MIT Senseable City Lab.
Nashid’s research focuses on the digital augmentation of architecture and con-
structed landscapes, particularly public spaces, and how novel technologies impact
the spatial experience by soliciting the needs and desires of inhabitants or users. She
is the author of many seminal articles and book chapters in the field of architectural
and urban technologies and is a frequent contributor to Iranian periodicals focused
on Architecture and Urbanism. Her research and projects in the field of digital
augmentation have been showcased in various venues, including the ACADIA,
IEEE Digital Ecosystems Conference, the UCMedia Conference on User-Centric
Media, the Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference, and Seed magazine.
She has taught classes on Responsive Environments, Smart Cities and Bottom-up
Urbanism, all focused on deployment of situated technologies in built environments,
at University of Toronto, MIT, North Eastern University, and Harvard Graduate
School of Design. During her three-year long appointment at Harvard Graduate
School of Design, she supervised a multi-year research project on Smart Cities at
GSD in collaboration with University of Bergamo. Nashid is a co-founder of (Shift)
Process Practice, an award-winning architecture studio based in Tehran. The practice
covers all scales pertaining to build environment ranging from infrastructures to
urban settings, architectures, and even artifacts. The practice is committed to con-
tributing to a paradigmatic shift to the design process.
She is also the director and co-founder of Tehran Urban Innovation Center
(TUIC), which is the R&D proxy of Shift studio.
Established in 2016, Tehran Urban Innovation Center is a design-by-research,
research-by-design initiative, dedicated to developing ideas for smart urban solutions
in contemporary Iranian cities.
The Center aims at tackling pressing urban issues through deployment of novel
technologies with the ultimate goal of making existing Iranian cities smarter, more
resilient, and as sustainable as possible. This is achieved with a trans-disciplinary
approach, capitalizing on the potential of mode-2 knowledge production, and IDEO
framework for Design Thinking.
e-mail: nashid_nabian@hotmail.com
Abbreviations
AI Artificial Intelligence
TUIC Tehran Urban Innovation Center
xix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Overview of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Fig. 2.1 Polar microphone patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Fig. 2.2 Pointwise sound collection fashion in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Fig. 2.3 Line-wise sound collection fashion in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Fig. 2.4 The perception of HAS from frequency and amplitude [1] . . . . . 20
Fig. 2.5 The basic concepts of pitch and loudness, which are directly
correlated with frequency and amplitude respectively . . . . . . . .. 22
Fig. 2.6 Concept of DTW. a Euclidian matching. b DTW matching.
c DTW in 3D space this figure is interpreted from [62, 63] . . .. 24
Fig. 2.7 Spectogram of a given sound which is magnified between
0.25 and 0.30 s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Fig. 2.8 24 Filters are uniformly spaced on the Mel scale . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Fig. 2.9 Citygram of Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Fig. 2.10 Block diagram of the proposed segmentation technique . . . . . . . 31
Fig. 2.11 Urban segmentation technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Fig. 2.12 Block diagram of the proposed classification technique . . . . . . . 32
Fig. 2.13 Urban audio classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Fig. 2.14 Taxonomy of various sounds in urban environment . . . . . . . . . . 34
Fig. 2.15 An example of functional sound map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Fig. 2.16 The developed GUI for audio classification
and segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 35
Fig. 2.17 Enrollment process for audio classification
and segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Fig. 2.18 The output for a given urban sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Fig. 2.19 Block diagram of the developed melodification technique . . . . . 37
Fig. 2.20 GUI for urban melody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Fig. 2.21 Urban melody GUI to track and play simultaneously . . . . . . . . . 38
Fig. 3.1 Kmeans clustering method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Fig. 3.2 The overall computer vision approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Fig. 3.3 The developed technique for green area detection . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Fig. 3.4 The official boundary (blue line) on the aerial Google Map . . . . 53
xxi
xxii List of Figures
Fig. 3.5 ROI of the aerial image map based on the official
city boundary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 54
Fig. 3.6 Several ROIs of the images inside the city boundary . . . . . . . .. 55
Fig. 3.7 Green color is extracted from a original to b filtered image
by color range method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 55
Fig. 3.8 Kmeans method for green pixel extraction a original image
b two clusters c three cluster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 56
Fig. 3.9 ROI of the aerial image map based on the separated official city
boundary (barcelona). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 57
Fig. 3.10 The proposed technique for automatic road detection . . . . . . . .. 58
Fig. 3.11 Original map loaded from Google Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 59
Fig. 3.12 Extracted road or networks by using computer
vision techniques. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 60
Fig. 3.13 Hybrid map (left) and satellite map (right) of same
location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 61
Fig. 3.14 Final result for water detection based on google
maps fusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 61
Fig. 3.15 Desert detection process a original image b green detection
c road detection d water detection e aggregate the water, green,
and road detection f post-processing by morphological image
processing technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Fig. 3.16 Original image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Fig. 3.17 Detected network (road) from original image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Fig. 3.18 Detected green from original image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Fig. 3.19 Detected water from original image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Fig. 3.20 Aggregated result from all green, water, and network
detections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 68
Fig. 3.21 Apply erosion on aggregated image to remove
built-up areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 69
Fig. 3.22 Desert detecting by applying color threshold technique . . . . . .. 70
Fig. 3.23 Apply morphological image processing on color detection
result to remove small built-up areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Fig. 3.24 The proposed built-up detection technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Fig. 3.25 Built-up detection by a threshold around 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Fig. 3.26 Built-up detection by a threshold around 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Fig. 3.27 Built-up detection by a threshold around 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Fig. 3.31 Built-up detection by a threshold around 100 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Fig. 3.32 Built-up detection by a threshold around 1000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Fig. 3.33 Shadow detecting by threshold amount of 0.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
List of Figures xxiii
Fig. 3.36 Edge detection for built-up area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 78

Fig. 3.37 EchoMap GUI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 79
Fig. 3.38 Block diagram of the proposed skyline detection . . . . . . . . . . .. 79
Fig. 3.39 Creating a panorama stitching image from sequence of video
frames (a) and b two video frames c the output result . . . . . . .. 80
Fig. 3.40 Binary image is computed based on original image by applying
Kmeans or threshold techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 81
Fig. 3.41 Morphological image processing by applying image closing . .. 81
Fig. 3.42 Morphological image processing by applying image
opening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 81
Fig. 3.43 Postprocessing by removing noise and consisting the image
segments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Fig. 3.44 Edge detection to detect the skyline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Fig. 3.45 Map skyline into the original image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Fig. 4.1 City of Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Fig. 4.2 Sound acquisition methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Fig. 4.3 Selected areas for linear and pointwise sound acquisition . . . . . . 89
Fig. 4.4 Pointwise frequency and SPL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Fig. 4.5 Linear frequency of the routes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Fig. 4.6 Taxonomy of various sound in urban environment . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Fig. 4.7 Taxonomy of various sound based on urban events . . . . . . . . . . 93
Fig. 4.8 Taxonomy of various sound based on urban function . . . . . . . . . 94
Fig. 4.9 Sound classification and segmentation of urban environment . . . 95
Fig. 4.10 Google map online image, city of Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Fig. 4.11 EcoMap GUI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Fig. 4.12 Detection of urban phenomenon in three different scales . . . . . . 100
Fig. 4.13 Built-up area of Tehran, Scale: 5000 * 5000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Fig. 4.14 Green spaces of the Tehran, Scale: 5000 * 5000 . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Fig. 4.15 Water surface of Tehran, Scale: 5000 * 5000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Chapter 1
Application of AI in Urban Design
1.1 Overview
The city is discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants,
we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by
looking at it.
Roland Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban”
Due to the complexity of the urban environment, urban planners and designers
need to simplify this complex system for the better understanding of the urban
changes. The aim of this book is centralized on the use of novel methods in
recognizing urban phenomenon and the way to deal with them. Nowadays thanks to
the appearance of the AI techniques this aim becomes feasible, up-to-date, and
immediate. Therefore we try to introduce AI techniques and their application on the
process of urban planning and design by the aim of improving the quality of life
within cities.
1.2 Book Structure
The remainder of this book is organized in four chapters. The first chapter is
dedicated to one dimensional signal watermarking. In this chapter, we will be
discussing audio and speech watermarking separately.
Chapter 2 provides an over view of urban acoustics, covers basic knowledge
signal processing, and moves to an investigation of computer audition techniques.
The chapter concludes with provision of a road map to create maps that represent
urban soundscapes.
Chapter 3 is focused on computer vision and its applications in urban studies.
The chapter starts with an over view of computer vision and image processing.
Next, several techniques for extracting different layers of an urban setting through
image processing of aerial photos is discussed. This investigative method allows for
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 1

M. A. Nematollahi et al., Computer Vision and Audition in Urban Analysis
Using the Remorph Framework, Studies in Systems, Decision and Control 192,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3543-3_1
2 1 Application of AI in Urban Design
Urban Science
Urban Urban
Smart CiƟes
Design planning
Chapter 2: Chapter 3:
Chapte 1: Chapter 4
Computer Vision in Computer AudiƟon in Urban
IntoducƟon Remorph
Urban Studies Studies
Echological Skyline Urban Audio Urban Audio Urban Audio

IntoducƟon History Remorph 1 Remorph 2
Map DetecƟon SegmentaƟon ClassificaƟon MelodificaƟon
Fig. 1.1 Overview of the book
bracketing various layers of information about the city including those associated
with green per capita, land-use, ratio of built to unbuilt spaces of the city, etc.
Chapter 4 documents the structure and outcome of the Remorph workshop series
and how computer vision and audition has been deployed for investigation of urban
phenomenon within the framework of these workshops.
Figure 1.1 presents the major focus of this book. As seen, this book has four
chapters which discuss application of computer vision and audition in urban
planning and design. All of these fields are arranged under the main filed of smart
city.
1.3 Situating the Question in the General Field of Inquiry
Nowadays cities, as a dynamic, heterogeneous, and multi-layer environments, are

growing and changing with ever-increasing speed. These day to day changes turn
cities into complex and unreadable systems that understanding their dynamics
becomes quite difficult if not impossible for their residents and decision makers
without capitalizing on the potentials that computational paradigms can offer in this
regard.
The future of cities will be affected by these everyday changes that should be
taken into consideration by urban planners, designers, and decision makers, in order
to steer these shifts to transform our cities to more sustainable, safe, and livable
environments.
1.3 Situating the Question in the General Field of Inquiry 3
From a different and yet closely related point of view, there is an extensive belief
that the physical structure of cities has a direct impact on the way people behave,
live, and interact in the city, and accordingly, the quality of life within the city
which is known as the index of urban livability [1–3].
Therefore, to improve the livability of the city and social well-being of its
denizens, creating a consciousness context about the physical performance, social
interaction, and the ecological condition of cities is increasingly important and
requires more technical and scientific solutions [4].
For that reason, reading, understanding, and representing the city is prerequisite
to figure out what a city is, how a city is shaped, how does its physical form
influence its future development, how do the characteristics of built environment
vary from city to city, and, how a city operates as a whole.
In line with this view, the translation of the complex environment of cities to
meaningful and practical information plays a significant role in planning, designing,
managing and supervising the operation of cities for urban planners and designers
and decision makers.
Theoretically, creating a complete knowledge-driven model of the city that
includes all conceivable parameters of its appearance and operation is impractical,
discontinuous, and hard, especially given the overwhelming size of modern cities
[5, 7].
As a result, it is difficult to precisely understand where are the poorest spaces in a
city that consideration is needed for their improvement, how is the city physical
structure changing over time, or how are the ecological parameters performing
within a developing city [6].
One of the predominant methods in acquiring information about the city spaces
is sending human auditors to the field to observe and record data. Today such a
method is not practical anymore because it is a time-consuming and costly process
and it can be used just for small urban areas, or a handful of small scale cities [4, 8].
Today, with access to cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and
technologies, the challenges of reading and understanding the city have been par-
tially rectified. When urban studies is married with the analytical techniques using
AI approaches, a more accurate and better way for analysis and supervision of
urban growth is given.
AI techniques are one of the greatest and latest used techniques for dealing with
complex dynamic problems of the urban studies.
In the past, the techniques used for urban planning were static, linear,
cross-sectional, and deterministic, which were not enough for understanding the
complex, dynamic, emerging, and non-linear factors of urban phenomena [9]. Now
a days, new approaches are developed and the focus of urban analysis is shifted
from static to dynamic, from linear to non-linear and from space to space-time [9].
In this book, our intention is to introduce a framework as an analytical tool to
analyze urban contemporary paradigms with informationally-driven digital tools.
We call this tool set the Remorph framework.
Remorph provides high-level concepts, techniques, and application methods for
data collection, analysis, and representation.
The prospective perspective of this framework is to find the quantitative methods

for measuring the level of livability of a given city through its influential param-
eters. In other words, the goal is to computationally qualify the quantitative aspects
of urban environments.
The chapters of this book cover both visual and audio aspects of the urban
phenomenon by the application of the computer vision and computer audition in
urban contemporary context.
Afterward, the developed methods are assessed against the outcome of Remorph
workshop series.
It is worth mentioning that the output of this method is limited and require more
investigation to be validated. However, the potential and ability of this method is
noticeable in qualifying the quantitative parameters of the urban phenomena.
1.4 Remorph as an Analytical Tool for Urban Studies
With the goal of improving the level of livability within the cities, urban designers
and planners, need to derive much more information from the city spaces and the
influential parameters if their dynamics.
Remorph is introduced here as an analytical tool for better understanding the
space of the city through computationally registering its subsystems. Registering,
recognition, analysis, and visualization of each and every subsystem of a city as a
context for occurrence of urban life could simplify the challenges for urban planners
and designers to take care of the urban environment in all spatial scales by the
prospect of creating a city which is more sustainable, livable, and smart.
Thus, Remorph framework is trying to read and visualize the city through
understanding its hidden layer.
A core method of Remorph framework is to rearrange the morphology, shape,
and structure of a city to reveal new facts and data pattern pertaining to its
dynamics, and at the same time, to explore different influential variables of the
urban phenomenon.
Remorph framework tries to break down a city structure into separate visible and
hidden layers, and then read, and analyze them to see the impact level of each and
every layer of the urban phenomena on the way cities operate and serve the needs of
their residents.
All these attempts are in line with an ambitious goal which is the improvement
of the level of livability in contemporary cities.
Hence, after introducing and recognizing the new and advantageous methods in
analyzing of the urban subsystems, preparing a list of effective and persuasive
parameters of the occurrence of the urban livability is imperative. Moreover, finding
a qualitative method to evaluate and measure the level of livability in the con-
temporary city is of interest.
1.4 Remorph as an Analytical Tool for Urban Studies 5
As a result, the intention of Remorph framework is to explore novel algorithms

for recognizing the spatial parameters of city dynamics and developing techniques
for data collection, analysis, and visualization.
Accordingly, Remorph framework outlines an interdisciplinary approach, uti-
lizing urban knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques, to develop the men-
tioned analytical tool that describes the multi-layer characteristics of the urban
environment.
Since Remorph creates a platform for urban designers as well as urban decision
makers for better understanding the environment of the cities as shifting, heteroge-
neous, multi-layer, and emerging spaces, eventually, the quality of life and livability
would be improved within the cities that are re-conceptualized as dynamic systems.
The city is re-evaluated through this framework in terms of its auditory and
visual characteristics. As such, Remorph uses AI techniques to process multivari-
able urban phenomena.
In urban audition, different physical features of the sound from the urban
environment will be extracted which would be helpful in determining the impact
level of this urban phenomenon on the livability of the cities.
In urban vision, the study is mostly focused on the different properties of the
land and built environment within the cities that would be applied for a better
understanding of the urban variables and their impact on the way cities operate.
This studies will pave a path for the future to help urban planners and decision
makers to have a better image of the city and can help them to predict future trends
in urban development. Decisive data that is produced using Remorph framework
can also be used to make well-informed decisions in improving the quality of life
and increase the urban livability of a given city and create a platform for having a
better place for living.
1.4.1 Computer Vision and Its Application in Urban

Planning and Design
Reviewing the history of cities reveals how the physical environments of the cities
influence the health and behavior of its citizens [10]. It also clarifies that this
characteristics of physical environment has a close relationship with the livability of
cities [11].
Nowadays thanks to computer vision techniques, the understanding of the city
appearance and its changes has become more feasible, practical, and conceivable by
using real-time data which is accessible all around the world [12].
Historically, urban planners and designers have collected this data using field
surveys. The pioneered work on detecting urban phenomenon was done by urban
planners, namely, Kelvin [13], Rapoport [14], and Nasar [15]. The concentration of
their work was mostly on the interviews, low-throughput visual impressions, and
the manual evaluation of the images [12].
These traditional techniques for data acquisition are mostly restricted to few
neighborhoods and are not useable to cover a large scale urban area and its
respective data layers.
Obviously, producing urban data through human efforts for several cities with
different variables across the world remains unfeasible, time-consuming and
expensive [1, 16].
As of 2016, a new source of data on urban phenomenon has appeared in the form
of Street View imagery [1, 17]. Street view created a platform for the urban planner
and designer to conduct more measurements of the physical characteristics of urban
phenomena. However, this kind of quantification of the urban variables leverage the
large online corpus of the street-level imagery but still, remains on the manual data
analysis and human intervention [1, 12].
Yet, thanks to development of computer vision as a subfield under computa-
tional sciences, and availability of the online imagery sources, the automated
classification and surveying of the urban phenomenon has become much easier and
practical for urban planners and designers. The advances in computer vision
methods which utilize machine learning algorithms, leverage the connection
between computer vision field and urban planning and design [12].
One of the outstanding projects on using computer vision to evaluate urban
appearance is Place Pulse project of MIT in 2011 [12, 18]. In this approach, Nikhil
Naik used a crowd-sourced dataset of the urban phenomenon by asking people to
rate images from pairs to address some questions such as; “which place looks
safer?”, “which place looks more beautiful?” or “which place looks livelier?” [12].
Naik then utilized this dataset to train computer vision algorithms, of streetscore.
Streetscore would predict the perception of a given urban appearance in terms of its
safety, beautification, and livability according to the human-derived ratings [19].
This approach which used both crowd sourcing dataset and computer vision
methods, together with the street-level imagery is considered as a method for better
identification of the urban appearance to explore socioeconomic contributing fac-
tors and determining the influential parameters for creating a livable city [20–22].
In line with this view, researchers started to use the streetscore method and
examine the characters of the neighborhoods which conclude some declaration such
as, the more historical part of the city is probably more lively [21], or the narrow
streets with high building densities are perceived as safer than wider streets with
few buildings [4]. In addition, streetscore similarly was used with the aid of the
mobile phone data to understand whether a more safer-looking neighborhood is a
more livelier place [23].
A historical review of academic endeavors illustrate that computer vision
methods can be applied to improve the quantitative study of the urban phenomenon
and spaces of a given city, resulting in a multidisciplinary approach for recognizing
emerging urban challenges and devising proper responses to them.
In this book, we try to propose and practice novel and intelligent algorithms of
computer vision for the detection and understanding of the urban variables. Our
intention is to explore the correlation between urban environmental parameters and
the livability within the cities. This application of the computer vision in detecting
environmental variables is divided into two parts, in terms of their scale; macro
view of the urban phenomenon which corresponds to the detection of the natural
and physical parameters of a city concluded from the online imagery, and micro
view of the urban phenomenon which is focused on the city skyline through
extracting data from the captured video within a city. The technical explanation of
the aforementioned computer vision algorithms is explained in Chap. 2.
1.4.2 A Brief History of Computer Audition and Its

Application in Urban Planning and Design
In the context of modern urban planning and smart cities, the sound of the urban
environment is introduced as a source of information about urban life. The sound of
urban environment is referred to as the urban soundscape, which is the component
of the acoustic environment and known as a sound or combination of the sounds
that arise from an environment and is perceived by human agents [24].
The study of urban soundscape is focused on the relationship between people,
activities, and places in a specific space and time. In short, its concentration is on
the way people consciously perceive the environment through registering various
sounds and react to it [25, 26]. Therefore, urban soundscape could be taken into
consideration as a contributing factor in evaluating urban livability within a city and
trying to adopt it as an influential factor in urban planning and design.
In traditional environmental noise control of the urban environment, numerous
efforts have been made to reduce Sound Pressure Level (SPL) for a better acoustic
comfort which may lead to the livability of the cities. However, the recent
approaches reveal that the acoustic comfort is not achievable only by reducing the
sound level. Acoustic comfort is obtained when there is a noticeable and consid-
erable interaction between environment and human. For instance, when the SPL is
below a certain level due to lack of interaction between urban agents, it is not
necessarily a value for the evaluation of the people’s acoustic comfort whilst the
sound source, the characteristic of the place, the attributes of the users and other
contributing parameters play a significant role in creating a livable space [3, 25, 27].
Soundscape, as a significant parameter of the urban livability, is a positive way
to cope with environmental noise pollution problems, to get a better acoustic
comfort in a given area [25, 28, 29]. Therefore, evaluating and identifying the
elements or steps that are relevant to the whole process of the urban soundscape
analysis is increasingly important to understand how sound is produced in the
environment, how it is perceived by the human agent, and how it affects it’s
surrounding. To obtain the desired results, interdisciplinary efforts involving
physical, social, cultural, psychological, and architectural aspects are needed with
the particular attention to urban open spaces and their dynamics.
Reviewing the history of the soundscape analysis reveals how it is complex,
incomplete, crucial, and influential in the way cities are operated and shaped over
the years. In this respect, numerous academic efforts have been applied to facilitate
the study of this complex and continuous urban phenomenon from a broad range of
perspectives.
One of the substantial research pertaining to the soundscape was proposed by
R. M. Schafer in the 1977s [30]. He is a Canadian musician and composer and, his
work was always about the relationship between ear, human beings, sound envi-
ronment, and society. The World Soundscape Project is one of his outstanding work
in this regard which is done at Simon Fraser University. The project was initially
about the modern study of the acoustic ecology. The project leads to finding a
recognizable solution for creating a harmony between the human community and
sonic environments by considering the changes in the soundscape overtime and
across cultures. The project examined how the environment could be registered
through auditory faculty and how study subject would try to remodel the orches-
trating of the urban soundscape [25, 31].
In line with this, soundwalk approach is another attitude in analyzing the
soundscape which is introduced as a work combining measurements of sound,
environment, and people with scientific investigations of people’s perception of
soundscape [28, 29]. This approach is concentrated mostly on the rout walks of the
urban setting while listening and experiencing the sonic environment and it covers
all aspects of the soundscape perception including context, views, and people
[30, 32, 33].
Today, most of soundscape studies are carried out through field surveys with
physical measurements of the sound, environment and perceptional interview or
questionnaires simultaneously. This is a determinative way to create a discourse
between sound, space, people, and other social factors to analyze the effects of the
sound in the urban environment [34]. Consequently, sounds, as a part of our daily
life, carry a great deal of information about the environment. Some of them are
unwelcome and uncomfortable. There are many different sources of sound within
an environment with various frequencies and SPL which is difficult to determine
individual contributors to the overall recorded sound. Accordingly, this urban
phenomenon will impress the lifestyle of the citizen and its computational analysis
is important. Analyzing the physical characteristics of sound as well as exploring
the contribution of this urban phenomenon on improving the level of livability of a
given city, requires more scientific techniques. Application of computer audition in
urban planning and design with the goal of developing effective methods to deal
with the auditory landscape of the urban phenomenon is introduced in this book.
The developed algorithms and techniques of using computer audition are described
in Chap. 3 and its application on the urban studies is explained in Chap. 4.
1.4.3 A Brief History of Data Visualization in Urban

Planning and Design
Data visualization which is at this point a focal point of academic endeavors by

many disciplines, refers to the study of visual representation of data and the way
that information is understood from pictures [35]. Data visualization is a modern
technique of graphical communication, and extract and interpret the meaning of
data. The extracted meaning arises within a social or cultural context and hence is
influenced by the peculiarities of this context [36].
Generally, data visualization techniques are utilized to communicate data or
information clearly and efficiently by encoding them as visual objects such as
points, lines, colors, or bars [37]. The goal is to make complex data more acces-
sible, understandable, and usable for human perception. As such, the results should
be simple and operative for reading and understanding a wide range of complex
information [38].
The application of data visualization has been a subject of inquiry in modern
urban planning as the variety of information relating to the cities and their dynamics
are becoming more than ever before [39]. Living in a world with an increasing rate
of production and consumption of information creates certain level of awareness
about the performance of the cities and the human interaction within the urban
environment.
However, urban data inherently tend to be vague and noisy. To turn it into useful
information for urban planners and designers, several preprocessing and spatial
mapping is required [40]. Urban data visualization is a field that attempts to make a
sizeable amount of complex urban data accessible and understandable. Urban data
visualization helps urban planners and designers to detect urban changes through
time and space, and to show variations, relationships, and potential connections,
among dependent variables, particularly those connections that are not as under-
standable as in non-visualized complex data [38].
Before the introduction of methods used in extracting and representing the
meaningful data from the urban setting using digital techniques, In Image of the
City Kevin Lynch introduced basic techniques to recognize the mental map of the
city. He proposed a diagrammatic representation of an urban setting to unveil all
tangible and nontangible parameters of a city. He identified elements which can be
implemented to decompose complex urban models into cognitive units which are
the simplification of a complex data-driven scheme of the urban phenomena. These
elements that are known as paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, can
basically describe the urban spatial organization [7, 13] (“Kevin Lynch-Image of
the City (1960),” n.d.). From his point of view, data visualization refers not only to
the demonstration of the physical structure of a city but also describes all sort of
connections hidden beyond the evidence, i.e., identity, transparency, congruence,
legibility or livability [41].
In line with this view, one of the other pioneering concepts to describe urban
spaces was been introduced by urbanist William Whyte in the 1970s. Whyte started
to study urban spaces through understanding the way people use the spaces as well
as the way they would like to interact with spaces. His bottom-up approach was
based on direct observation, talking to people, and documentation of the evidence
using time lapsed photography and cinematic documentation to describe human
behavior in urban settings. This method described the characters of urban public life
in an objective and measurable way by utilizing cameras, movie cameras, and
notebooks [42]. Whyte believed that people could vote for the spaces by their feet,
they usually use the spaces that are accessible, comfortable and enjoyable whilst
they do not use the spaces that are not [42]. These kinds of city occurrence pre-
sentation have been pervasively used, to collect and analyze data regarding human
intervention which was fundamentally time-consuming and could cover just a
handful of cities. However, these methods are still being used for documentation of
city events, yet are merged with new technical and scientific methods that utilize
digital technology and computation.
In recent years, there has been an increased scope for the automatic visualization
of urban phenomenon due to the appearance of the digital network upon cities and
remote monitoring systems using cameras all around the urban areas [39]. The new
technical methods are utilized to help urban planners and designers in extracting
meaning from the online images and also the recorded videos to make sense of the
ever changing urban landscape.
Urban data visualizations fall under two closely related and yet fundamentally
different categories in terms of their physical or spatial characters. One is related to
the physical and visual aspects of changes and the other is related to the data which
has no direct counterpart in physical reality. The second category needs some kind
of translation or mapping with an explicit visual representation to be perceived and
understood [43].
The aerial images, which are available in Google Earth, OpenStreetMap, and
other satellite imagery, are used to physically observe different urban parameters
and help urban planners and designers to look at the cities from the above and
understand the overlapping variables of the urban structure, whereas the CCTV
cameras which record urban events are used to see the way people interact with
each other and with the space as intelligent agents.
As a result, cities are changing constantly with the overlapping information and
systems which are difficult to understand and to explain locally or globally over
time. Data visualization is an important way for architects, planners, and policy
experts to communicate with the data which is used dramatically nowadays. Today,
thanks to the evolution of artificial intelligent techniques, using computer vision
and computer audition, this wide range of data can be recognized and classified for
a better understanding of the urban phenomenon and its changes. On one hand,
these studies help to comprehend the history of a city over times. On the other hand,
these studies are utilized to predict urban structure changes based on the experi-
ences from the past, successful and failed procedures or non-realized scenarios.
1.4.4 A Brief History of City as a Cybernetic Mechanism

and Application of Data-Driven Analysis in Urban
Planning and Design
We understand that an urban system is a complex and dynamic space that human
action takes place within it. From a descriptive point of view, Hillier and Vaughan
explained that an urban setting is contained of two phenomena; firstly it corre-
sponds to the large variety of buildings linked by space, i.e., “the physical structures
of a city” and secondly, it is referred to the majority of human activities linked by
interaction, i.e., “the social aspect of a city” [44]. Additionally, all these urban
systems are changing constantly and face different conditions from day to day.
Now, the question is, how a dynamic and complex urban system can operate
between this physical structure and social aspect elements in the time of increasing
change.
Under such condition, we shall obtain a more efficient urban system if its various
layers and components can adapt themselves to the day to day changes by the same
speed at which these occur [45].
Therefore, in this context, digital technology help urban planners and designers
to extract large amounts of information about the various processes contained
within the built environment and monitor everyday changes of the urban phe-
nomenon. In this regard, cybernetic mechanisms are applied to regulate the per-
formance of cities to perform more efficiently, intelligently, and sustainably while
promoting the well-being for their citizens [46]. Cybernetic mechanisms catch
information from different sources of urban dynamics, store them, and then merge
digital information with fundamental aspects of social justice for the purpose of
creating a smart city that is safe, livable, and sustainable [47]. This is based on the
belief that reforming the physical environment can revolutionize the life of a city
with a growing pervasive influence on nature, structure, urban activities, and
everyday life [48]. In such cases, therefore, embedding digital information into the
urban physical environment and utilizing them for regulatory effect, have been
variously coined as cyber cities [49], digital cities [50], intelligent cities [51], smart
cities [52] or sentient cities [53], whilst each of these terms is used in a particular
way to conceptualize the relationship between digital information and contempo-
rary urbanism [54].
The benefit of deployment a cybernetic urban management mechanism can be
both actuating the built environment via embedded actuators as well as actuating
people within the built environment by creating a real-time information platform
that affects the citizens’ decision making. This view of the urban processes can
access and support information exchange between urban spaces and citizens.
Retrofitted by cybernetic mechanisms, the city can operate as an adaptive sys-
tem, allowing urban phenomena to change their behavior according to the current
situation. This operation also will happen by utilizing the customized digital net-
work [46]. The study of cybernetic adaptation of the city began decades ago with
scientific achievements of cybernetics in trying to study each and every urban
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"In their cylinders," was Rhodes' low answer. "We want to see
without being seen, that is why. I can turn on the electric, of course,
at any instant. Wish the Dromans had been nearer, on this side of
that rock-mass; I would have darkened theirs too."
"Without being seen?" I queried. "In Heaven's name, Milton, what
does it mean?"
"I don't know. Got your revolver handy?"
"Yes."
"Good! Keep it so!"
"But what is it?"
"Did you," said he, "notice that passage in the opposite wall, a few
yards back?"
I whispered that I had.
"Well," said Milton Rhodes, "there is something in there. And it's
coming this way!"
Chapter 29
THE GHOST
We waited, listening intently; but the place was as silent as the tomb.
"What," I asked, "did you hear?"
"I have no idea, Bill, what it was."
"What were the sounds like?"
"I don't know."
"Were they loud or faint?"
"Faint—mysterious."
"Great Heaven," said I, "what can it be? How long since you first
heard it?"
"Only a few minutes. I can't imagine why the sounds have ceased. It
certainly was coming this way. I wonder if it has discovered our
presence."
"In that case, we had better look out."
"Well, that is what we are doing."
"Hadn't we better wake the Dromans?"
"I see no necessity for it. When the thing comes—it was coming, I
know—they may be awakened suddenly enough. The men are
farther from the passage of course, than we are, the ladies farther
still. It must pass us before it can reach them; and we have our
revolvers."
"Yes; we have our revolvers. But we don't know what's coming."
"There!" Rhodes exclaimed, his voice a whisper. "We'll soon know.
Did you hear that?"
"I heard it. And there it is again!"
"It's coming, Bill!"
It was coming. What were we to see issue from that passage? I
gripped my revolver and waited in a suspense that was simply
agonizing. The sound ceased. It came again. It was a pad-pad. Once
or twice another sound was heard. I thought that that one was
produced by something brushing along the wall.
"Look!" I said, crouching forward. "Light!"
The rays grew stronger, casting long shadows—shadows swaying,
shaking, crawling.
Then of a sudden the light itself appeared, and a tall figure came
gliding out of the passage.
"Drorathusa!" exclaimed Milton Rhodes.
This sudden lurch from agonized suspense and Gorgonic
imagination to glad reality left me for some seconds speechless.
"Well, well," laughed Milton Rhodes, pressing the button and flooding
the place with light, "isn't imagination a wonderful thing?"
"But," said I, "what on earth does this mean?"
"Look there, Bill, look!" cried Rhodes. "Look at that!"
Drorathusa was moving straight towards us, a strange smile on that
beautiful Sibylline face of hers.
"What do you mean? Look at what?"
"The canteen! Look at her canteen!" cried Milton pointing excitedly.
Drorathusa stopped and raised the canteen, which was incased in
canvas-like stuff. It was wet. Yes, it was wet and dripping.
"Water!" I cried, springing up and rushing toward her.
"Narranawnzee!" smiled Drorathusa, reaching out the canteen
toward my clutching fingers.
Great Pluvius, how I did drink! I'd be drinking yet if Rhodes hadn't
seized the vessel and wrested it from me.
"You must be careful, Bill," he said. "We mustn't drink too much at
first."
And he raised the canteen forthwith and proceeded to swallow a
couple of quarts.
"For Heaven's sake," I told him, "leave some for the others!"
"Yes," said Rhodes, handing the water to Drorathusa. "We have
been kind of ungallant, Bill—hoggish, I'm afraid. But I was as dry as
a burnt cork."
Ere he had ceased speaking, Drorathusa was moving toward her
companions. How wonderful was that change, that rush from out the
black depths of despair! And yet our situation was still truly a terrible
one, for we were lost. But we did not think of that now. Water, water!
We had water now and rejoiced as though we had been caught up
and set down in the loveliest of all the lovely glades of Paradise.
A few minutes, and we all (with tent and packs, with everything) were
following Drorathusa through the passage, were hurrying toward that
spring or stream or pool which she had discovered. What whim, what
freak of strange chance had led that mysterious woman forth whilst
others slept the sleep of despair, forth into that particular passage?
Even now I do not know the answer.
After following its sinuosities for several hundred feet, we suddenly
stepped out of the passage and into a great chamber. This, like our
sleeping-place was weird and savage in the extreme. Broken rock-
masses rose up, in all directions. There were distorted pyramids,
fantastic pinnacles, spires, obelisks, even pillars, but they were
pillars grotesque and awful as though seen in a dream.
Wider and wider grew the place, more and more broken and savage.
Soon even the walls were involved in darkness. The roof, as we
advanced, became more and more lofty. Clearly this cavern was one
of enormous extent. I began to glance about with some
apprehension. How had Drorathusa found her way into such a place
—and out again? I marveled that she had not got lost. But she had
not, and evidently there was no likelihood that that could happen.
She was moving forward, into that place of savage confusion, with
never a sign of hesitation, with the certitude of one following a well-
beaten path.
Suddenly Drorathusa stopped, and, after making a sign for silence,
she said, pointing into the blackness before us:
"Narranawnzee."
Narranawnzee. Yes, there it was, the faint murmur and tinkle of
water.
We hurried forward, the wall of the cavern emerging from out the
darkness. And there it was, a large spring of the purest, coolest
water gushing out from the base of the rock, to fall in a gentle
cascade and then flow away to a great pool gleaming dark and
sullen in the feeble rays that found their way to it.
It was near nine o'clock of the day following when we left that spot.
Rhodes and I were smooth-shaven again; yes, he had brought along
a razor, one of your old-fashioned, antediluvian scrapers. I actually
believe that it was an heirloom from the Man of Piltdown, or perhaps
from the more ancient Pithecanthropus erectus himself.
Ondonarkus and Zenvothunbro too had gladly availed themselves of
this opportunity to get rid of their beards, which, however, they had
kept trimmed close with clippers. Your Droman has a horror of
mustache, beard or whiskers.
As for the ladies, they were now radiant and lovely as Dians.
We were following the stream. An hour passed, another. We had
advanced five miles or so and had descended probably half a
thousand feet. And then we lost our guide; the stream flowed into a
cleft in the rock, to burst forth again, perhaps, far, far down, in some
black cavern that has never known, and indeed never may know, the
tread of any human foot.
For some moments we lingered there, as though reluctant to quit the
spot; and then, with a last lingering look at those pellucid waters,
flashing dark and sullen, however, as the light moved from them, we
pressed grimly on and soon were involved in a cavern so rugged and
smashed that we actually began to despair of ever getting through it.
But we did get through, to abruptly step out into a place as smooth
almost as a floor. The slope was a gentle one, and we pressed
forward at a rapid rate.
We had gone perhaps a mile and a half when Rhodes, who was
walking in advance with Drorathusa, abruptly halted, cried out and
pointed.
Something white was dimly visible off in the darkness. We moved
toward it, the Dromans evincing a tense excitement. A cry broke
from them, and they made a rush forward.
It was a mark upon the wall, a mark which they themselves had
placed there.
We had found the way to Drome.
"And let us hope," said I to Rhodes in the midst of the rejoicing, "that
we don't lose it again."
Drorathusa turned her look upon Rhodes and me and pointed down
the cavern.
"Narranawnzee," she said.
We understood that.
"Narranawnzee," said we.
Again Drorathusa pointed.
"Drome," she told us.
That too we understood; that is, we thought that we knew what she
meant by Drome.
It was a few minutes past seven (p.m.) when we reached the
narranawnzee, a fine deep pool without any discoverable inlet or
outlet, and there we halted for the "night."
In this spot, the Dromans had left a food-depot, and right glad were
we to see this accession to the larder. There was also a supply of oil.
That evening (I find it convenient to use these inaccurate terms) I
fished out my journal and carefully brought it forward, up to the hour,
to the very minute. I felt blithe as a lark, and so, indeed, did
everybody else, everybody save Drorathusa, and even she was
somberly happy.
I thought that our troubles were over!
Of a sudden Rhodes slapped down his journal and, to the surprise of
the Dromans and, forsooth to my own, made a dive at an oil-
container, which Ondonarkus had just emptied.
"At last—our depth, Bill," he cried.
And he proceeded to ascertain the boiling-point of water, the heat
being furnished by Drorathusa's lamp and that of Silvisiris, the older
of the young women. Nandradelphis, by the way, was the name of
the other, the white-haired girl.
It was a strange, a striking picture truly—Milton Rhodes bending over
his improvised hypogemeter, the Dromans looking on with curiosity,
perplexity and with strange questionings in their looks.
At last Rhodes was satisfied with the result, that it was as near
accuracy as the circumstances would permit.
"We are," said he after computing for some moments in his journal,
"at a depth of a little more than twelve thousand feet. The exact
figures are twelve thousand two hundred and sixty feet, though we
can not, of course, claim for our determination any high degree of
accuracy. I feel confident, however, that it is near the truth. Call it
twelve thousand feet."
"Twelve thousand feet!" I echoed. "Below the level of the sea?"
"Yes, Bill; below the level of the sea."
"Great Erebus, I knew that we had descended a long way, but I
would never have believed that we had gone down over two miles.
Two miles, and more, below sea-level. That is a record-smasher."
"Rather," Milton smiled. "Before us no man (of our sunlit world) had
penetrated into the crust of the earth to a greater depth than three
thousand seven hundred and fifty-eight feet below the level of the
sea. That is the depth of the mine at St. John del Rey, Minas
Geraes, Brazil."
"Two miles—over two miles down!" said I.
"And probably, Bill, we are only just getting started."
"But the pressure. We can't go down very far into this steadily
increasing pressure, increasing in a geometrical ratio whilst the
depth increases only in an arithmetical one."
"But," Milton said, "I showed you that there is something wrong with
the law."
"Then how do you know that we have reached a depth of twelve
thousand feet and over, if the law breaks down?"
"I don't believe that it has broken down yet. It will hold good for this
slight descent which we have made. And, of course, if fact is found
to coincide with theory, then our descent will be arrested at no great
depth."
"And," I said, "unless the discrepancy between fact and theory is a
remarkable one, we will have no means of knowing whether the law
has broken down or not. For it is impossible, in this world of utter
darkness, to make anything like an accurate estimate of the descent
made good."
"We shall have no means of knowing, Bill, unless, as you say, truth
and theory are remarkably divergent. Of course, in that case, we
should not long remain unaware of the fact. Of the depth, then, we
can not be certain; but the boiling-point of water will always give us
the atmospheric pressure."
"That isn't what is worrying me," I told him; "it is the pressure itself."
"The pressure itself," Milton returned, "would produce no dire effects.
It is not the diminution of pressure that produces the dreaded
mountain sickness, as was clearly shown by Dr. Paul Bert. Of
educated people, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every
thousand will tell you that the acceleration of the pulse as one
ascends to lofty heights, the short, troubled breathing, the disordered
vision, extreme weakness, nausea, vertigo, bleeding at nose and
lungs in short, all the symptoms of the terrible mal des montagnes,
are caused by the diminution of the atmospheric pressure. The
average human being (such is their explanation) having a surface of
about fifteen square feet, sustains an atmospheric pressure of thirty
thousand pounds; at an elevation of eighteen thousand feet, the
pressure is but one half of that; is it any wonder, then, that a man
gets mountain sickness?"
"Shades of ten thousand Gullivers," I exclaimed, "do you mean to
say that those nine hundred and ninety-nine are wrong?"
"Certainly they are wrong, so wrong as to cause Dr. Bert to write:
"'It is amazing to find a theory so plainly at variance with elementary
physical laws accepted by eminent men.'"
"Well, well," was my sage remark, "I suppose the next thing on the
programme will be the statement that it is not the fire that makes the
pot boil; it is the heat; and that it is simply amazing to find a man who
thinks that he has an iota of brains in his cranium entertaining the
belief that it is the pot that boils."
"If it doesn't rain, Bill, tomorrow will be Monday. However, Dr. Bert
(Professor in the Paris Faculty of Sciences) proved 'that the
lessening of the barometric pressure,' to use his own words, 'is of no
account, mechanically, in the production of the phenomena.' Yes, he
proved that, to use his own words again, 'it is not the lowering of
mechanical pressure that produces the symptoms, but the low
tension prevents the oxygen from entering the blood in sufficient
quantity.'
"Dr. Bert not only experimented on sparrows but entered the air-
chamber himself. As the pressure was reduced, he experienced all
the symptoms of mountain sickness.
"'But,' he says, 'all these symptoms disappeared as by enchantment
as soon as I respired some of the oxygen in the bag; returning,
however, when I again breathed the air of the cylinder.'
"In one of his experiments, the pressure was reduced to 246
millimeters—9.7 inches.
"'This,' he says, 'is exactly the pressure on the highest summit of the
Himalayas—the same degree of pressure which was so near proving
fatal to Glaisher and Coxwell; I reached this point without the
slightest sense of discomfort, or, to speak more accurately, the
unpleasant sensations I felt at the beginning had entirely
disappeared. A bird in the cylinder with me was leaning on one side,
and very sick. It was my wish to continue the experiment till the bird
died, but the steam-pump, conspiring, as I suspect, with the people
who were watching me through glass peep-holes, would not work,
and so I had to return to normal pressure.'
"So you see, Bill, it is the low tension of the oxygen and not the
diminished pressure that produces the distress and suffering and
even death."
"All this is very interesting, but our problem is not one of rarefied air;
the atmosphere here is compressed."
"And, in compressed air," said Milton Rhodes, "it is the oxygen again
that produces the symptoms. Subject a sparrow to a pressure of
twenty atmospheres, and the bird is thrown into convulsions,
stronger than those produced by tetanus or strychnine, convulsions
which soon end in death. If pure oxygen is used, a pressure of only
five atmospheres kills the sparrow. But, and mark this, if the air be
deficient in oxygen, the pressure of twenty atmospheres does not
produce even a tremor.
"So you see, Bill," Milton concluded, "we could descend to a very
great depth in an atmosphere poor in oxygen."
"But how do we know that the atmosphere down there is poor in
oxygen? It may be nothing of the kind. It may be saturated with it."
"Of course, we don't know. All we know is that we know nothing. And
that reminds me of Socrates. That is what he said—that all he knew
was that he didn't know anything. And Arcesilaus—Arcesilaus
declared that Socrates didn't even know that much! However, hope
is as cheap as despair. And, remember, here are our Hypogeans.
They can ascend to our world, to a height of eight thousand feet
above the level of the sea, and that, so far as we know, without
suffering the slightest inconvenience."
"Something queer about that," was my comment.
"It is queer, Bill. However, we know that they can live in the (to them)
rarefied air of our world: why, then, think that conditions down there,
whether five miles down or fifty miles down, will prove fatal to us?"
On the following morning, we were under way at an early hour. The
route led down a great tunnel; we could not have got lost now if we
had tried. Shortly before noon, the welcome sounds of
narranawnzee were heard, and there was a large stream gushing
out of the wall. At times, as we advanced, the stream would move
along dreamy and silent; then it would be seen rushing and glancing
and again growling and foaming in lovely cascades.
Steadily, save for the noon halt, we toiled our onward and downward
way. It was half-past seven when we halted—the eerie silence of the
place broken by the soft, musical murmuring of the narranawnzee.
Again Rhodes ascertained the boiling-point of water. It was 251°
Fahrenheit. We were, therefore, under a pressure of two
atmospheres; we had reached the depth of eighteen thousand five
hundred feet. In other words, we were three miles and a half below
the level of the sea!
It seems strange that I awoke, for I was dreaming the loveliest
dream, a dream of fairy landscapes, birds and flowers, with lovely
Cinderella (she looked very much like Drorathusa) in the midst of
them. Nor do I know why I turned over onto my right side, for I was
very comfortable as it was. But turn I did. And I was just going to
close my eyes, to return to the dreamland of the fairies. But I did not
close them. Instead, my heart gave a wild leap, and I opened my
eyes wide. The next instant I was sitting up, straining my eyes as I
looked into the darkness. Fear had its grip upon me, and I felt my
hair begin to stand on end.
For there was something in that blackness, something visible,
something moving!
Scarcely had my eyes fallen upon this amorphous, ghostly thing
when it rose into the air, slowly and without the faintest sound. Up it
rose and up, whilst I sat watching, immovable, speechless, as
though in the clutch of some uncanny charm.
Up! Up to the very roof of the cavern!
Of a sudden there was a fearful change in its form. Then the ghost,
now of monstrous shape, was coming down—coming down straight
towards me!
Chapter 30
THE MOVING EYES
I jerked out my revolver; I reached over and gave Rhodes a shake
that would have awakened Epimenides himself; then I grabbed the
electric light and flashed it upon the descending monster.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. Nothing but the empty air. The
monster had vanished.
"What's the matter?" came the sudden voice of Rhodes. "What in
Paradise is going on now?"
I rubbed my eyes and stared upward once more.
"Look there!" said I, pointing. "Tell me, do you see nothing there?"
"There isn't anything there, Bill—now."
"But there was something there a second or two ago, and it didn't go
away."
"Ergo it is still there," said Milton. "But, you see, it isn't. What did you
see?"
"I wish I knew. I thought at first that it was a demon, phosphorescent
or something. It was up there. I tell you it was up there. And it was
coming down, coming down straight towards this very spot."
"Great Caesar's spook!" exclaimed Rhodes.
"I can't understand," I told him, "where the thing went. It was there,
and the next instant it wasn't. And yet it didn't go away."
"Turn off your light," Rhodes said quickly. "Turn it off, Bill."
"Great Zeus, what for? You'd better have your revolver ready."
"Revolver fiddlesticks! Off with it, Bill; off with the light!"
The light went off. And look! There it was again, and almost directly
over us. It was not descending now but was hovering, hovering, as
though watching, waiting. Waiting for what? And it seemed, too, to
thrust out arms or tentacula. And look at that! Something started to
drop from it—phosphorescence (I shall call it that) dropping to the
floor, where it writhed and crawled about like a mass of serpents.
Writhed and crawled and grew dimmer and dimmer, faded, faded.
We sat staring at this mysterious, inexplicable phenomenon in
amazement, fascination and horror.
"What in the world can it be?" I asked, my voice a whisper.
"Who," returned Rhodes, "would ever have dreamed of such a thing
as that?"
"I'm afraid," I told him, a shudder passing through me, "that our
revolvers can't hurt a thing like that. It seems to be watching us.
Look! Aren't those eyes—eyes staring at us, moving?"
"Eyes? Watching us? Eyes moving? Oh, Lord, Bill!" said Rhodes.
"Then what is it? It's moving."
"Oh, it's moving. But it hasn't any eyes."
There was a momentary silence.
"As for sending a bullet into it," he added, "don't do anything so
foolish."
He arose, stepped over and awoke Ondonarkus. The monster was
still hovering over the spot. The Droman bestowed upon that ghost
but a cursory, careless look, then yawned sleepily.
"Yam-yump!" said Ondonarkus, stretching himself.
Milton Rhodes laid a hand upon the other's shoulder and pointed an
interrogative finger up in the direction of the phantom. The Droman
gave a careless, airy toss of the hand.
"Drome," said he, then lay down again.
It was obvious from this monosyllabic answer, to say nothing of the
manner of Ondonarkus, that there was absolutely nothing to
apprehend from this mysterious apparition hovering above us.
Certainly, though, there had not been any remarkable clarification.
Indeed, in a way, Rhodes and I were more puzzled than ever.
Drome, Drome. What could be the meaning of that word? Drome.
"It seems, Bill," said Rhodes, "that we are on our way to a very
strange place. As for that ghost up there, it must be a fragment, as it
were, of the light of this subterranean land."
"Suppose it is—a harbinger, so to speak—then what, in the name of
wonder, can that light be?"
"That, of course, we can not tell. It may be phosphorescent or
auroral, or its origin may be one of which no man of our own world
ever has even dreamed. I believe that I forgot to mention, when we
were speaking of this the other day, that even human beings
sometimes evolve light.[12] One thing, however, is certain: there is
light somewhere in this underground world. And I believe, Bill, that
we are drawing near to it now."
"I certainly hope that we are. But look at our ghost. It is moving again
—thank Heaven (even if it is only a mass of light) away from us."
"Yes," said Rhodes. "But look down there. There is another one
coming."
It came, and another and another. I don't know how many. On they
came through the cavern, now lingering, now hovering; on they
passed like some unearthly, ghostly procession. And, even though
one knew that these phantoms, so dim and so misty, were perfectly
innocuous, were as natural (as though there is anything that can not
be natural!) as the light of the fire-fly, as the glow of the auroral
arches and streamers—all the same, I say, the sight of that spectral
company, passing, passing, was one indescribably strange and
uncanny.
However, a man can get used to anything. I got used to them and
ere very long was asleep once more. In the morning, not a single
ghost was to be seen. Nor did we see one until near midafternoon.
That ghost was all by its lonesome and so dim that it vanished when
our lights drew near. But soon they were about us in all directions.
One of these phantoms, large, amorphous, writhing (its light so
strong that it was bright in the rays of the lamps but not of the electric
ones) came crawling along, swaying and shaking, straight toward us.
Rhodes and I, as if by instinct, moved over so as to miss it; but
Drorathusa and the others walked right into it. As they emerged from
the spectral, phosphorescent cloudlet, the light clung to them like
wraiths of fog, to be slowly dissipated as they advanced in little
streams and eddies behind them.
It was during this afternoon, too, that Rhodes made the first
discovery of animal life in this fearsome place—little fish, like those
in the Mammoth Cave, totally blind. But, though they could not see,
they could feel the light. When the rays fell upon the stream, they
would drop to the bottom and seek the concealment of the shadow-
places. Poor little blind things! What an existence! And yet how like
them, after all, are we poor humans! How often have I thought of
these sad words of Dr. Whewell's:
"It is not necessary here to inquire why those faculties which appear
to be bestowed upon us for the discovery of truth, were permitted by
Providence to fail so signally in answering that purpose."
Yes, blind are we, though we have eyes; our souls shrinking from the
light to wander, lost and happy and doubting and fearful, in psychic
caves and labyrinths more terrible even sometimes than this cavern
through which we were making our way—making our way to we
knew not what.
We journeyed on until about seven o'clock, when we reached
another depot, and there we halted for the night. All were much
fatigued, but the Dromans were in high spirits, and ours rose, too.
Whether we were drawing towards the end of our strange journey
was not clear; but there could be no doubt that a great change was
imminent.
To the surprise of Rhodes and myself (nothing in the place seemed
to surprise Drorathusa and her companions) not a single light-wraith
was anywhere to be seen. The cavern was as black as the deepest
pit in Erebus.
And it was still the same when we awoke. How I would have
welcomed the appearance of the faintest, loneliest ghost, as we
called the small apparitions of light.
We noticed that Ondonarkus and Zenvothunbro, and the ladies also,
were at some pains to have their bows in such a position that they
could be drawn at an instant's warning. Ondonarkus saw us
watching, and, sweeping a hand toward the darkness before us, he
said:
"Loopmuke."
That, as we well knew, is the Droman word for ape-bat. Also, he tried
to tell us about something else; but the only thing intelligible to us in
his pantomimic explanation was that it was about a creature even
more formidable than a wild loopmuke.
It was with keen anticipation on the part of Rhodes and myself that
we set out that morning. For an hour or so, there was no change.
Not a single light-wraith had shone in the awful blackness. Then,
after passing through a particularly broken and tortuous place, we
began to see them. Not many, however, and all were small and faint.
Another hour passed, and of a sudden the walls drew together, and
the roof came sloping down, down and down until we had to go
bended over. Narrower and narrower grew the way, crowding us at
last to the water's edge and then into the very stream itself.
Drorathusa and Ondonarkus were leading, Rhodes and I bringing up
the rear. Fortunately the current was a gentle one; had it been
otherwise, the place would have been simply impassable.
"I certainly," said Milton at last, "admire the man (maybe he was a
woman) who first came through this awful place."
The next moment he made a rush forward. Nandradelphis, the white-
haired girl, had slipped out into deep water. Rhodes caught her just
in time to save her from immersion and drew her back to the shallow
water by the wall. Not a cry, not the faintest sound had escaped her,
and now she only laughed. Beauty was not the only admirable
quality that these Droman ladies possessed.
For ten minutes or so, we toiled our way down that tunnel, now
hugging the wall, now following the shallows out into the stream and
at times to the other side. Then of a sudden there was an
exclamation from Drorathusa, and the next moment we had issued
from the tunnel and the stream and found ourselves in a great lofty
cavern.
"Great Rameses!" I exclaimed as we stepped forth. "Look at those
things."
Rhodes, I found, had already halted and was gazing up at them—
two colossi, one on either side of the mouth of the tunnel. These
carven monsters (we were, of course, standing between their bases)
were seated, and one was a male, the other a female. They had not
been fashioned in situ but clearly had been brought to the spot in
sections. But how had those massive pieces of rock, the smallest of
which weighed tons, been raised into their places? Who can tell? It
remains, and probably always will remain, one of the mysteries of
that lost and mysterious land.
We were getting rather used to strange things now; but, so
remarkable were these great statues, for some minutes we lingered
there before them.
The Dromans had moved on. We followed, to find ourselves in a few
moments before a monstrous carven human head. There was the
great pedestal, and there, lying face upward before it, was the great
head, that and nothing more.
"Poor fellow," said I as we walked around the caput, "where is the
rest of him? And why did they leave the head lying here like this?"
"I have an idea," Milton returned, "that there was no rest of him, that
this head was all that was to be placed upon that pedestal."
I suppose that Rhodes was right. One wonders what happened there
so long ago, why the great caput was never raised to the place
which they had prepared for it. No man can tell that now. All we know
is that there the great head lies, that there it has lain for, in all
probability, untold thousands of years.
At last Milton Rhodes climbed up and stood upon the chin, in order,
as he said, "to get a good view of the poor gink's phiz." And not only
that, but he stood upon the poor fellow's nose; yes, he balanced
himself on one foot on the very tip of it.
I turned my look to the Dromans with some apprehension, for I did
not know what superstitious ideas they might entertain, feared that to
them this acrobatic stunt of Rhodes might be sacrilege itself. My
misgivings, however, were groundless. The Dromans were delighted.
They burst into merry laughter; they applauded vociferously. Even
Drorathusa laughed outright.
Little wonder, forsooth, for a pretty figure Milton Rhodes made
balanced up there on the poor gink's olfactory protuberance. A fine
posture truly for one of the world's (I mean, of course, our world's)
great scientists; and I could not help wondering what certain dignified
old fellows (Milton called them fossils) would have thought could
they, by television or some miracle, have seen him there. And what
would the Dromans themselves think? Well, I was glad when he
came down and there was an end to that foolishness.
And I put in a prompt remonstrance.
"We," I told him, "have—or, at any rate, we ought to have—a certain
dignity to uphold. For we are the representatives, as it were, of that
great sunlit world above, the world of Archimedes, Kepler, Galileo,
Newton, Humboldt, Darwin, Edison—not a world of Judys and
Punches."
"Aw, Bill," was the answer that I got, "now quit your kidding."
I ask you this again: what can you do with a man like that?
We soon quitted the spot. The light-cloudlets were all about us now.
Some came slowly gliding, some crawling, along the floor; some
along the walls and the roofs. Others floated along overhead or hung
motionless in the air. The changes of form were sometimes very
rapid and certainly as unaccountable as the masses themselves.
Occasionally we would see a mass slowly take form in the darkness
and as slowly fade into darkness again. Where did the light come
from, where did it go? And the explanation of this uncanny
phenomenon? Undoubtedly some electric manifestation, said
Rhodes, analogous perhaps to the light of the aurora. That, I
objected, really explained nothing, and Rhodes admitted that that
was just what it did explain—nothing.
Which reminds me of the beautiful eclaircissement which Professor
Archimedes Bukink gave when the little girl to whom he was reading
a fairystory asked:
"But what is that flamingo thing?"
"Phoenicopterus ruber," said Bukink!
The spirits of the Dromans rose higher as we toiled our way onward
and down. They quickened their pace, and, as we swung along like
soldiers marching, they suddenly broke into a song or rather chant,
the wonderful contralto voice of Drorathusa leading, the sounds
coming back from the dark secret places of the cavern in echoes
strange and sweet as voices heard in fairyland.
The light-masses were steadily increasing in number and volume.
Especially was this pronounced in the great chambers. Fungoid
growths were seen, coleopterous insects and at last a huge
scolopendra of an aspect indescribably horrible. From this repulsive
creature, the Dromans and myself drew back, but Milton Rhodes
bent over it in a true scientific scrutiny and ecstasy.
"Look, Bill, look!" he cried suddenly pointing, "Look at that. The body
has thirty-five somites or segments."
"Thirty-five segments?" I queried, scratching my head and wishing
that the scolopendra was in Jericho. "What is there so wonderful
about that?"
"Why," said he, "in the Scolopendridae of our own world, the
segments of the body never exceed twenty-one. And this one has
thirty-five. Really, Bill, I must keep so remarkable and splendid a
specimen."
"Great Gorgons and Hydras! Keep it? Don't touch the horrible thing.
It may be venomous, deadly as a rattlesnake. And, besides, you'll
have plenty of time to collect specimens, and probably some of them

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Computer Vision and Audition in Urban

Analysis Using the Remorph

Computer Vision and Image Analysis Digital Image

Advances in Computer Vision: Proceedings of the 2019

Brain Source Localization Using EEG Signal Analysis 1st

Towards the Internet of Things: Architectures,

Image Processing and Computer Vision in iOS Oge Marques

Computer Vision Using Deep Learning Neural Network

Modern PyQt: Create GUI Applications for Project

Challenging Cases in Dermatology Volume 2 Advanced

Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

Computer Vision and

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13304

ISSN 2198-4182 ISSN 2198-4190 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963031

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Heterogeneous, dynamic, multi-layer, and complex network structures of cities are

Tehran, Iran Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

Tehran, Iran Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

Remorph: A Framework for Application of Computer

August 2018 Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

1 Application of AI in Urban Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2.5.1 Pitch Extraction Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 22

4.3.1 Data Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 88

Fig. 1.1 Overview of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Fig. 3.36 Edge detection for built-up area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 78

1.2 Book Structure

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 1

Echological Skyline Urban Audio Urban Audio Urban Audio

Fig. 1.1 Overview of the book

1.3 Situating the Question in the General Field of Inquiry

Nowadays cities, as a dynamic, heterogeneous, and multi-layer environments, are

The prospective perspective of this framework is to ﬁnd the quantitative methods

1.4 Remorph as an Analytical Tool for Urban Studies

As a result, the intention of Remorph framework is to explore novel algorithms

1.4.1 Computer Vision and Its Application in Urban

1.4.2 A Brief History of Computer Audition and Its

1.4.3 A Brief History of Data Visualization in Urban

Data visualization which is at this point a focal point of academic endeavors by

1.4.4 A Brief History of City as a Cybernetic Mechanism

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