This book on autonomous road-following vehicles brings together twenty years of innovation in the field. The book uniquely details an approach to real-time machine vision for the understanding of dynamic scenes, viewed from a moving platform that begins with spatio-temporal representations of motion for hypothesized objects whose parameters are adjusted by well-known prediction error feedback and recursive estimation techniques.
This Dynamic World is visually beautiful and full of useful knowledge. The book makes plain what has been obscure. Long before our "New Age" of Aquarius or even the environmental evangelism of "an inconvenient truth," Charles Morgan, 91 year old "Hindu preacher" and "farmer philosopher," revealed the secrets of the last days. For instance, we learn that Levi Dowling brought forth the Akashic Record and Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ not in the 1960s, but in the 1860s. Long before the "planned community," "open space," or "green space," Charles Morgan postulated the "city in a building." From the dust bowl to today's "drying of the west," this farmer said we farm too much and honor nature too little. This Dynamic World leads us to prophets from Moses to Edgar Cayce, thinkers from Plato to Confucius, scientists from Einstein to Hawking, and also spiritual masters like Paramahansa Yogananda, the first Hindu yogi in America and his disciple. In this book, we learn from saints like Paul and John on his isle of Patmos as well as from heavenly messengers (called by some angels, by others astral beings). We find God With Us (called by some Messiah, by others avatar). The book is a key to enlightenment on a spiritual level of existence in a planetary community for individual and worldwide salvation where we are all related and must relate to each other. This is the concept of "biorelativity." This Dynamic World calls us on a Worldwide Crusade for Biorelativity. This Dynamic World uses the "fabric of time" as a scientific basis for prophecy and the astral cycle of George King, Jeanne Dixon, and Ruth Montgomery. We embrace "good vibrations," "energy," meditation, and "yoga" but also the Word of God and the philosophies of men in a determination to take blessed action.
"Dynamic Vision is a unique book. To my knowledge, there is no comparable book that covers the broad and complex domain of adaptive visual recognition in such a readable way. The clear presentation style helps the reader to appreciate the painstaking work involved in making the automatic recognition of faces possible the authors were successful in providing 'a coherent and unified treatment of the issue from a computational and systems perspective' and highly recommend the book to any researcher interested in face recognition or visual recognition in general." Cognitive Systems Research
This book presents the technical aspects of an economic model used to examine issues of global economic significance, such as the impact on the world economy of changes in trade and environmental policy. The book provides a number of studies using the model to examine trade reform, growth and investment, climate change, natural resources, technology, and demographic change and migration.
Computer systems that analyze images are critical to a wide variety of applications such as visual inspections systems for various manufacturing processes, remote sensing of the environment from space-borne imaging platforms, and automatic diagnosis from X-rays and other medical imaging sources. Professor Azriel Rosenfeld, the founder of the field of digital image analysis, made fundamental contributions to a wide variety of problems in image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision. Professor Rosenfeld's previous students, postdoctoral scientists, and colleagues illustrate in Foundations of Image Understanding how current research has been influenced by his work as the leading researcher in the area of image analysis for over two decades. Each chapter of Foundations of Image Understanding is written by one of the world's leading experts in his area of specialization, examining digital geometry and topology (early research which laid the foundations for many industrial machine vision systems), edge detection and segmentation (fundamental to systems that analyze complex images of our three-dimensional world), multi-resolution and variable resolution representations for images and maps, parallel algorithms and systems for image analysis, and the importance of human psychophysical studies of vision to the design of computer vision systems. Professor Rosenfeld's chapter briefly discusses topics not covered in the contributed chapters, providing a personal, historical perspective on the development of the field of image understanding. Foundations of Image Understanding is an excellent source of basic material for both graduate students entering the field and established researchers who require a compact source for many of the foundational topics in image analysis.
Why environmental learning is crucial for understanding the connected challenges of climate justice, tribalism, inequity, democracy, and human flourishing. How can we respond to the current planetary ecological emergency? In To Know the World, Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time—migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy—connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accomplished much, but it has not been able to stem the inexorable decline of global ecosystems. Thomashow, the former president of a college dedicated to sustainability, describes instead environmental learning, a term signifying that our relationship to the biosphere must be front and center in all aspects of our daily lives. In this illuminating book, he provides rationales, narratives, and approaches for doing just that. Mixing memoir, theory, mindfulness, pedagogy, and compelling storytelling, Thomashow discusses how to navigate the Anthropocene's rapid pace of change without further separating psyche from biosphere; why we should understand migration both ecologically and culturally; how to achieve constructive connectivity in both social and ecological networks; and why we should take a cosmopolitan bioregionalism perspective that unites local and global. Throughout, Thomashow invites readers to participate as educational explorers, encouraging them to better understand how and why environmental learning is crucial to human flourishing.
What is creative destruction? Creative destruction, what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the essential fact about capitalism," describes change or disruption in the economy caused by innovations that replace traditional technologies and practices. Creative destruction is a force so powerful that it has not only shaped economies but also politics, culture, and social relations. In clear and accessible prose, Dalton and Logan illustrate the nature and varieties of creative destruction, how it is central to innovation and entrepreneurship, and why it is important for economic growth. With in-depth case studies of how Netflix challenged and displaced Blockbuster, and how Uber and other ride-sharing companies are disrupting traditional taxi services, this book examines how economies, societies, and cultures change due to the innovation and experimentation that is central to the prosperity of free societies.
