Synergistic solidification of lead-contaminated soil by magnesium oxide and microorganisms.

Although microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) technology effectively promotes the remediation of heavy metal contaminated soils in low concentrations, the high concentration of heavy metals has a toxic effect on microorganisms, which leads to the decline of carbonate yield and makes the soil strength and environmental safety after remediation no up to the standard. This study describes the synergistic curing effect of MgO and microorganisms on soil contaminated with high concentrations of heavy metals. The experimental results with MgO showed 2-6 times increase in unconfined compressive strength (UCS) compared to bio-cemented samples without MgO. Toxicity characteristic leaching procedure experiments indicated that Pb-contaminated soil at 10,000 mg/kg with quantitative MgO for synergistic solidification could meet the international solid waste disposal standards, which leachable Pb2+ are less than 5 mg/L. In addition, the microscopic results showed that the introduction of MgO promoted the formation of magnesium calcite and dolomite, improved the solidification efficiency of heavy metal contaminants, and demonstrated the presence of Pb2+ in carbonate minerals. This study suggests that MgO and microorganisms have broad application prospects for synergistic solidification of Pb2+ soil.

Polarimetric SAR Speckle Filtering Using a Nonlocal Weighted LMMSE Filter.

Despeckling is a key preprocessing step for applications using PolSAR data in most cases. In this paper, a technique based on a nonlocal weighted linear minimum mean-squared error (NWLMMSE) filter is proposed for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) speckle filtering. In the process of filtering a pixel by the LMMSE estimator, the idea of nonlocal means is employed to evaluate the weights of the samples in the estimator, based on the statistical equalities between the neighborhoods of the sample pixels and the processed pixel. The NWLMMSE estimator is then derived. In the preliminary processing, an effective step is taken to preclassify the pixels, aiming at preserving point targets and considering the similarity of the scattering mechanisms between pixels in the subsequent filter. A simulated image and two real-world PolSAR images are used for illustration, and the experiments show that this filter is effective in speckle reduction, while effectively preserving strong point targets, edges, and the polarimetric scattering mechanism.