Image feature points are detected as pixels which locally maximise a detector function, two commonly used examples of which are the (Euclidean) image gradient and the Harris–Stephens corner detector. A major limitation of these feature detectors is that they are only Euclidean-invariant. In this work, we demonstrate the application of a 2D equi-affine-invariant image feature point detector based on differential invariants as derived through the equivariant method of moving frames. The fundamental equi-affine differential invariants for 3D image volumes are also computed.

The present paper deals with the kinetic-theoretic description of the evolution of systems consisting of many particles interacting not only with each other but also with the external world, so that the equation governing their evolution contains an additional term representing such interaction, called the ‘forcing term’. Firstly, the interactions between pairs of particles are both conservative and nonconservative; the latter represents, among others, birth/death rates. The ‘forcing term’ does not express a ‘classical’ force exerted by the external world on the particles, but a more general influence on the effects of mutual interactions of particles, for instance, climate changes, that increase or decrease the different agricultural productions at different times, thus altering the economic relationships between different subsystems, that in turn can be also perturbed by stock market fluctuations, sudden wars, periodic epidemics, and so on. Thus, the interest towards these problems moves the mathematical analysis of the effects of different kinds of forcing terms on solutions to equations governing the collective (that is statistical) behaviour of such nonconservative many-particle systems. In the present paper, we offer a study of the basic mathematical properties of such solutions, along with some numerical simulations to show the effects of forcing terms for a classical prey–predator model in ecology.

A model is presented for the diffusion-driven drying of a polymeric solution such as liquid paint. Included is a stress build-up and relaxation in the polymer network of the viscoelastic material, which influences the diffusion process. The behaviour of the (one-dimensional) model is analysed by means of the maximum principle and illustrated with numerical calculations.

We investigate, both analytically and numerically, dispersive fractalisation and quantisation of solutions to periodic linear and nonlinear Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou systems. When subject to periodic boundary conditions and discontinuous initial conditions, e.g., a step function, both the linearised and nonlinear continuum models for FPUT exhibit fractal solution profiles at irrational times (as determined by the coefficients and the length of the interval) and quantised profiles (piecewise constant or perturbations thereof) at rational times. We observe a similar effect in the linearised FPUT chain at times t where these models have validity, namely t = O(h−2), where h is proportional to the intermass spacing or, equivalently, the reciprocal of the number of masses. For nonlinear periodic FPUT systems, our numerical results suggest a somewhat similar behaviour in the presence of small nonlinearities, which disappears as the nonlinear force increases in magnitude. However, these phenomena are manifested on very long time intervals, posing a severe challenge for numerical integration as the number of masses increases. Even with the high-order splitting methods used here, our numerical investigations are limited to nonlinear FPUT chains with a smaller number of masses than would be needed to resolve this question unambiguously.

Symmetries and adjoint-symmetries are two fundamental (coordinate-free) structures of PDE systems. Recent work has developed several new algebraic aspects of adjoint-symmetries: three fundamental actions of symmetries on adjoint-symmetries; a Lie bracket on the set of adjoint-symmetries given by the range of a symmetry action; a generalised Noether (pre-symplectic) operator constructed from any non-variational adjoint-symmetry. These results are illustrated here by considering five examples of physically interesting nonlinear PDE systems – nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations, Navier-Stokes equations for compressible viscous fluid flow, surface-gravity water wave equations, coupled solitary wave equations and a nonlinear acoustic equation.

We consider Hele-Shaw flows driven by injection of a highly shear-thinning power-law fluid (of exponent n) in the absence of surface tension. We formulate the problem in terms of the streamfunction ψ, which satisfies the p-Laplacian equation ∇·(|∇ψ|p−2∇ψ) = 0 (with p = (n+1)/n) and use the method of matched asymptotic expansions in the large n (extreme-shear-thinning) limit to find an approximate solution. The results show that significant flow occurs only in (I) segments of a (single) circle centred on the injection point, whose perimeters comprise the portion of free boundary closest to the injection point and (II) an exponentially small region around the injection point and (III) a transition region to the rest of the fluid: while the flow in the latter is exponentially slow it can be characterised in detail.

A minimization problem for partially wetting droplet profiles is considered, in which Van der Waal's forces have been taken into account via a singular ‘disjoining pressure’. When the singular disjoining pressure is neglected, energy minimization leads to Laplace's equation and Young's equation; once the singular disjoining pressure is included, this is no longer the case. Indeed, the free energy is no longer bounded from below. Introducing the notion of overtaking to compare the energies of configurations whose energies are arbitrarily large and negative, we demonstrate that if a configuration is not convex then it cannot be an absolute minimizer. If profiles are allowed to ‘double-over’ then there does not exist an absolute minimizer. Within the class of profiles which do not double-over, absolute minimizers are shown to exist; these minimizing profiles are not single-valued. The singular minimization problem is shown to be discontinuously dependent on the definition of the wetting profile in the neighbourhood of the contact points; the implications of this discontinuity are discussed.

In this paper we study the question of existence and uniqueness of solutions to the equation

which occurs in the modelling of hard contact lenses. Using ‘shooting’ arguments, we show that, depending on the parameters in the problem, there are cases where there is precisely one solution, others where there is more than one, and others where there are none.

We consider phase transition processes in which the thermodynamic variables are the temperature and an order parameter. Various classes are identified and many specific examples are illustrated. In this framework the question of the range of applicability of the so-called ‘additivity rules’ is investigated, showing that they apply only to a very special type of processes.

Residential burglary is a social problem in every major urban area. As such, progress has been to develop quantitative, informative and applicable models for this type of crime: (1) the Deterministic-time-step (DTS) model [Short, D’Orsogna, Pasour, Tita, Brantingham, Bertozzi & Chayes (2008) Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci.18, 1249–1267], a pioneering agent-based statistical model of residential burglary criminal behaviour, with deterministic time steps assumed for arrivals of events in which the residential burglary aggregate pattern formation is quantitatively studied for the first time; (2) the SSRB model (agent-based stochastic-statistical model of residential burglary crime) [Wang, Zhang, Bertozzi & Short (2019) Active Particles, Vol. 2, Springer Nature Switzerland AG, in press], in which the stochastic component of the model is theoretically analysed by introduction of a Poisson clock with time steps turned into exponentially distributed random variables. To incorporate independence of agents, in this work, five types of Poisson clocks are taken into consideration. Poisson clocks (I), (II) and (III) govern independent agent actions of burglary behaviour, and Poisson clocks (IV) and (V) govern interactions of agents with the environment. All the Poisson clocks are independent. The time increments are independently exponentially distributed, which are more suitable to model individual actions of agents. Applying the method of merging and splitting of Poisson processes, the independent Poisson clocks can be treated as one, making the analysis and simulation similar to the SSRB model. A Martingale formula is derived, which consists of a deterministic and a stochastic component. A scaling property of the Martingale formulation with varying burglar population is found, which provides a theory to the finite size effects. The theory is supported by quantitative numerical simulations using the pattern-formation quantifying statistics. Results presented here will be transformative for both elements of application and analysis of agent-based models for residential burglary or in other domains.

In this work, we carry out an analytical and numerical investigation of travelling waves representing arced vegetation patterns on sloped terrains. These patterns are reported to appear also in ecosystems which are not water deprived; therefore, we study the hypothesis that their appearance is due to plant–soil negative feedback, namely due to biomass-(auto)toxicity interactions.

To this aim, we introduce a reaction-diffusion-advection model describing the dynamics of vegetation biomass and toxicity which includes the effect of sloped terrains on the spatial distribution of these variables. Our analytical investigation shows the absence of Turing patterns, whereas travelling waves (moving uphill in the slope direction) emerge. Investigating the corresponding dispersion relation, we provide an analytic expression for the asymptotic speed of the wave. Numerical simulations not only just confirm this analytical quantity but also reveal the impact of toxicity on the structure of the emerging travelling pattern.

Our analysis represents a further step in understanding the mechanisms behind relevant plants‘ spatial distributions observed in real life. In particular, since vegetation patterns (both stationary and transient) are known to play a crucial role in determining the underlying ecosystems’ resilience, the framework presented here allows us to better understand the emergence of such structures to a larger variety of ecological scenarios and hence improve the relative strategies to ensure the ecosystems’ resilience.

In this paper, we consider the time decay of the solutions to some problems arising in strain gradient thermoelasticity. We restrict to the two-dimensional case, and we assume that two dissipative mechanisms are introduced, the temperature and the mass dissipation. First, we show that this problem is well-posed proving that the operator defining it generates a contractive semigroup of linear operators. Then, assuming that the function involving the coupling terms is elliptic, the exponential decay of the solutions is concluded as well as the analyticity of the solutions. Finally, we describe how to obtain the exponential stability in the case of hyperbolic dissipation.

We examine a problem in which a line sink causes a disturbance to an otherwise uniform flowing stream of infinite depth. We consider the fully non-linear problem with the inclusion of surface tension and find the maximum sink strength at which steady solutions exist for a given stream flow, before examining non-unique solutions. The addition of surface tension allows for a more thorough investigation into the characteristics of the solutions. The breakdown of steady solutions with surface tension appears to be caused by a curvature singularity as the flow rate approaches the maximum. The non-uniqueness in solutions is shown to occur for a range of parameter values in all cases with non-zero surface tension.

This paper re-examines the problem of the flow of a fluid of finite depth over two Gaussian-shaped obstructions on the stream bed. A weakly nonlinear analysis in the form of the Korteweg–de Vries equation is used to compare with the results of the fully nonlinear problem. The main focus is to find waveless subcritical solutions, and contours showing the obstruction height and separation values that result in waveless solutions are found for different Froude numbers and different obstruction widths.

The selection of Saffman–Taylor fingers by surface tension has been extensively investigated. In this paper, we are concerned with the existence and selection of steadily translating symmetric finger solutions in a Hele–Shaw cell by small but non-zero kinetic undercooling (ε2). We rigorously conclude that for relative finger width λ near one half, symmetric finger solutions exist in the asymptotic limit of undercooling ε2 → 0 if the Stokes multiplier for a relatively simple non-linear differential equation is zero. This Stokes multiplier S depends on the parameter $\alpha \equiv \frac{2 \lambda -1}{(1-\lambda)}\epsilon^{-\frac{4}{3}}$ and earlier calculations have shown this to be zero for a discrete set of values of α. While this result is similar to that obtained previously for Saffman–Taylor fingers by surface tension, the analysis for the problem with kinetic undercooling exhibits a number of subtleties as pointed out by Chapman and King (2003, The selection of Saffman–Taylor fingers by kinetic undercooling, Journal of Engineering Mathematics, 46, 1–32). The main subtlety is the behaviour of the Stokes lines at the finger tip, where the analysis is complicated by non-analyticity of coefficients in the governing equation.

Previous study of contact of power-law graded materials concerned the contact of a rigid body (punch) with an elastic inhomogeneous foundation whose inhomogeneity is characterised by the Young modulus varying with depth as a power function. This paper models Hertzian and adhesive contact of two elastic inhomogeneous power-law graded bodies with different exponents. The problem is governed by an integral equation with two different power kernels. A nonstandard method of Gegenbauer orthogonal polynomials for its solution is proposed. It leads to an infinite system of linear algebraic equations of a special structure. The integral representations of the system coefficients are evaluated, and the properties of the system are studied. It is shown that if the exponents coincide, the infinite system admits a simple exact solution that corresponds to the case when the Young moduli are different but the exponents are the same. Formulas for the length of the contact zone, the pressure distribution and the surface normal displacements of the contacting bodies are obtained in the form convenient for computations. Effects of the mismatch in the Young moduli exponents are studied. A comparative analysis of the Hertzian and adhesive contact models clarifies the effects of the surface energy density on the contact pressure, the contact zone size and the profile of the contacting bodies outside the contact area.

Critical transitions (or tipping points) are drastic sudden changes observed in many dynamical systems. Large classes of critical transitions are associated with systems, which drift slowly towards a bifurcation point. In the context of stochastic ordinary differential equations, there are results on growth of variance and autocorrelation before a transition, which can be used as possible warning signs in applications. A similar theory has recently been developed in the simplest setting for stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) for self-adjoint operators in the drift term. This setting leads to real discrete spectrum and growth of the covariance operator via a certain scaling law. In this paper, we develop this theory substantially further. We cover the cases of complex eigenvalues, degenerate eigenvalues as well as continuous spectrum. This provides a fairly comprehensive theory for most practical applications of warning signs for SPDE bifurcations.

We consider the two-dimensional Rayleigh–Taylor problem for the dynamics of the free interface Γ between two layers of immiscible viscous liquids. For a slow flow model (which corresponds to the case of a small relative jump of density) and under sufficiently wide assumptions on the geometry of Γ, we analyze the time dynamics of Γ. In particular, we prove that its increase in time t is bounded by an exponential function with exponent independent of Γ.

In this paper, we extend and complement previous works about propagation in kinetic reaction–transport equations. The model we study describes particles moving according to a velocity-jump process, and proliferating according to a reaction term of monostable type. We focus on the case of bounded velocities, having dimension higher than one. We extend previous results obtained by the first author with Calvez and Nadin in dimension one. We study the large time/large-scale hyperbolic limit via an Hamilton–Jacobi framework together with the half-relaxed limits method. We deduce spreading results and the existence of travelling wave solutions. A crucial difference with the mono-dimensional case is the resolution of the spectral problem at the edge of the front, that yields potential singular velocity distributions. As a consequence, the minimal speed of propagation may not be determined by a first-order condition.

Typical problems with solutions characterised by first-kind discontinuities occurring at interfaces of layered inhomogeneous media are considered with respect to second-order differential equations in partial derivatives. Direct, inverse and mixed types of solution discontinuities are considered. Presented are generalised formulations of problems under consideration, having discontinuous solutions and allowing a uniform description of the processes of heat, mass and charge transfer in multilayer media. Homogeneous difference schemes built on the basis of generalised solutions, which are illustrated by test problems with analytical solutions, are given.