I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

2 1 The innovative transport systems and the CityMobil project 10 1.1 The research questions 10 2 The state of art in the field of automatic transport systems 12 2.1 Case studies and demand studies for innovative transport systems 12 3 The design and implementation of surveys 14 3.1 Definition of experimental design 14 3.2 Questionnaire design and delivery 16 3.3 First analyses on the collected sample 18 4 Calibration of Logit Multionomial demand models 21 4.1 Methodology 21 4.2 Calibration of the “full” model. 22 4.3 Calibration of the “final” model 24 4.4 The demand analysis through the final Multinomial Logit model 25 5 The analysis of interaction between the demand and socioeconomic attributes 31 5.1 Methodology 31 5.2 Application of Mixed Logit models to the demand 31 5.3 Analysis of the interactions between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models 32 5.4 Mixed Logit model and interaction between age and the demand for the CTS 38 5.5 Demand analysis with Mixed Logit model 39 6 Final analyses and conclusions 45 6.1 Comparison between the results of the analyses 45 6.2 Conclusions 48 6.3 Answers to the research questions and future developments 52

The European commission

Impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita Le cause e le responsabilita dei cambiamenti climatici sono state trattate sul numero di ottobre della rivista Cda. Approfondiamo l’argomento presentando il documento: “Cambiamenti climatici 2007: impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita” votato ad aprile 2007 dal secondo gruppo di lavoro del Comitato Intergovernativo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Si tratta del secondo di tre documenti che compongono il quarto rapporto sui cambiamenti climatici.

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Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Remote sensing imagery needs to be converted into tangible information which can be utilised in conjunction with other data sets, often within widely used Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As long as pixel sizes remained typically coarser than, or at the best, similar in size to the objects of interest, emphasis was placed on per-pixel analysis, or even sub-pixel analysis for this conversion, but with increasing spatial resolutions alternative paths have been followed, aimed at deriving objects that are made up of several pixels. This paper gives an overview of the development of object based methods, which aim to delineate readily usable objects from imagery while at the same time combining image processing and GIS functionalities in order to utilize spectral and contextual information in an integrative way. The most common approach used for building objects is image segmentation, which dates back to the 1970s. Around the year 2000 GIS and image processing started to grow together rapidly through object based image analysis (OBIA - or GEOBIA for geospatial object based image analysis). In contrast to typical Landsat resolutions, high resolution images support several scales within their images. Through a comprehensive literature review several thousand abstracts have been screened, and more than 820 OBIA-related articles comprising 145 journal papers, 84 book chapters and nearly 600 conference papers, are analysed in detail. It becomes evident that the first years of the OBIA/GEOBIA developments were characterised by the dominance of ‘grey’ literature, but that the number of peer-reviewed journal articles has increased sharply over the last four to five years. The pixel paradigm is beginning to show cracks and the OBIA methods are making considerable progress towards a spatially explicit information extraction workflow, such as is required for spatial planning as well as for many monitoring programmes.

Object based image analysis for remote sensing

While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

The amount of scientific literature on (Geographic) Object-based Image Analysis – GEOBIA has been and still is sharply increasing. These approaches to analysing imagery have antecedents in earlier research on image segmentation and use GIS-like spatial analysis within classification and feature extraction approaches. This article investigates these development and its implications and asks whether or not this is a new paradigm in remote sensing and Geographic Information Science (GIScience). We first discuss several limitations of prevailing per-pixel methods when applied to high resolution images. Then we explore the paradigm concept developed by Kuhn (1962) and discuss whether GEOBIA can be regarded as a paradigm according to this definition. We crystallize core concepts of GEOBIA, including the role of objects, of ontologies and the multiplicity of scales and we discuss how these conceptual developments support important methods in remote sensing such as change detection and accuracy assessment. The ramifications of the different theoretical foundations between the ‘per-pixel paradigm’ and GEOBIA are analysed, as are some of the challenges along this path from pixels, to objects, to geo-intelligence. Based on several paradigm indications as defined by Kuhn and based on an analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature we conclude that GEOBIA is a new and evolving paradigm.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3r28w930/qt3r28w930.pdf?t=n18hz8

Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis - Towards a new paradigm.

While remote sensing has made enormous progress over recent years and a variety of sensors now deliver medium and high resolution data on an operational basis, a vast majority of applications still rely on basic image processing concepts developed in the early 70s: classification of single pixels in a multi-dimensional feature space. Although the techniques are well developed and sophisticated variations include soft classifiers, subpixel classifiers and spectral un-mixing techniques, it is argued that they do not make use of spatial concepts. Looking at high-resolution images it is very likely that a neighbouring pixel belongs to the same land cover class as the pixel under consideration. Algorithms in physics or mechanical engineering developed over the last twenty years successfully delineate objects based on context-information in an image on the basis of texture or fractal dimension. With the advent of high-resolution satellite imagery, the increasing use of airborne digital data and radar data the need for context-based algorithms and object-oriented image processing is increasing. Recently available commercial products reflect this demand. In a case study, ‘traditional’ pixel based classification methods and context-based methods are compared. Experiences are encouraging and it is hypothesised that object-based image analysis will trigger new developments towards a full integration of GIS and remote sensing functions. If the resulting objects prove to be ‘meaningful’, subsequent application specific analysis can take the attributes of these objects into account. The meaning of object dimension is discussed with a special focus on applications for environmental monitoring.

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Object-oriented Image Processing in an Integrated GIS/Remote Sensing Environment and Perspectives for Environmental Applications

This book addresses the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing communities worldwide by presenting a collection of 43 peer-reviewed interdisciplinary perspectives on Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA). OBIA is a recent sub-discipline of Geographic Information Science devoted to developing automated methods to partition remote sensing imagery into meaningful image-objects, and assessing their characteristics through spatial, spectral and temporal scales. Its applications range from agriculture and natural resource management, to national defense and global climate change. Its economic impact spans from data collection, hardware and software vendors, developers and users, to recipients of sound sustainable environmental policy. Its effect is to synergistically bridge the raster world of remote sensing and the vector world of GIS by generating new semantically rich queryable geographic-information from multiscale earth observation data. We invite you to join us on this exciting state-of-the art journey into OBIA. The accompanying CD includes high resolution figures.

Object-Based Image Analysis: Spatial Concepts for Knowledge-Driven Remote Sensing Applications

This book brings together a collection of invited interdisciplinary perspec- tives on the recent topic of Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA).

Object-Based Image Analysis

The advancement of feature recognition and advanced image analysis techniques facilitates the extraction of thematic information, for policy making support and informed decisions. As a strong driver, the availability of VHSR data and the ever increasing use of geo-information for all kinds of spatially relevant management issues have catalyzed the development of new methods to exploit image information more ‘intelligently’. This chapter highlights some of the recent developments from both technology and policy and poses a synthetic view on an upcoming paradigm in image analysis and the extraction of geo-spatial information. It starts from a review of requirements from international initiatives like GMES (Global Monitoring of Environment and Security), followed by a discussion the possible answers from OBIA including a detailed portrait of the methodological framework of class modeling. The chapter closes with a short reflection on the required adaptation of standard methods of accuracy assessment and change detection, as well as on the evaluation of delineated and classified objects against the ultimate benchmark, our human perception.

Stefan Lang

Papers

Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis - Towards a new paradigm.

Object-oriented Image Processing in an Integrated GIS/Remote Sensing Environment and Perspectives for Environmental Applications

Object-Based Image Analysis: Spatial Concepts for Knowledge-Driven Remote Sensing Applications

Object-Based Image Analysis

Object-based image analysis for remote sensing applications: modeling reality – dealing with complexity