During investigations into fungal diversity in the Tibetan Plateau, two Helvella collections were made. Morphological characteristics and phylogenetic analyses of combined ITS and LSU sequence data revealed one collection represents a distinct new species that is introduced as Helvella cystidiata. Helvella cystidiata is characterized by having loosely saddle-shaped pileus, greyish to grey brown hymenium, lacunose stipe and inflated ectal excipulum cells. Furthermore, a known species Helvella lacunosa is reported in Tibetan Plateau. Detailed descriptions, illustrations and a phylogenetic tree to show the placement of two taxa are provided.

During the investigation of lignicolous freshwater fungi in the Tibetan Plateau habitat, fifteen collections were isolated from submerged decaying wood. Fungal characteristics are commonly found as punctiform or powdery colonies with dark pigmented and muriform conidia. Multigene phylogenetic analyses of combined ITS, LSU, SSU and TEF DNA sequences showed that they belong to three families in Pleosporales. Among them, Paramonodictys dispersa, Pleopunctum megalosporum, Pl. multicellularum and Pl. rotundatum are established as new species. Paradictyoarthrinium hydei, Pleopunctum ellipsoideum and Pl. pseudoellipsoideum are reported as new records on the freshwater habitats in Tibetan Plateau, China. The morphological descriptions and illustrations of the new collections are provided.

Mid-infrared imaging systems are widely applied in gas-leak detection. However, infrared images generally suffer from low contrast and poor quality. In this paper, an image-enhancement method based on Gaussian filtering and adaptive histogram segmentation is proposed to effectively improve the quality of infrared images. It can effectively improve the quality of infrared images, which contributes to the subsequent gas-image feature extraction. The traditional background modeling algorithm is analyzed, and the ViBe (visual background extractor) algorithm is studied in depth. Based on the advantages and disadvantages of the ViBe algorithm and the characteristics of gas-leak images, a gas-leak region detection method based on the improved ViBe algorithm is proposed. The test results show that it can quickly establish a background model, segment the gas-leak region with motion characteristics, and render the gas-leak region in color based on grayscale mapping to achieve the automatic detection and enhanced display of gas leaks.