16,282 research outputs found
The role of economics in ecosystem based management:The case of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive; first lessons learnt and way forward
The EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) sets out a plan of action relating to marine environmental policy and in particular to achieving ‘good environmental status’ (GES) in European marine waters by 2020. Article 8.1 (c) of the Directive calls for ‘an economic and social analysis of the use of those waters and of the cost of degradation of the marine environment’. The MSFD is ‘informed’ by the Ecosystem Approach to management, with GES interpreted in terms of ecosystem functioning and services provision. Implementation of the Ecosystem Approach is expected to be by adaptive management policy and practice. The initial socio-economic assessment was made by maritime EU Member States between 2011 and 2012, with future updates to be made on a regular basis. For the majority of Member States, this assessment has led to an exercise combining an analysis of maritime activities both at national and coastal zone scales, and an analysis of the non-market value of marine waters. In this paper we examine the approaches taken in more detail, outline the main challenges facing the Member States in assessing the economic value of achieving GES as outlined in the Directive and make recommendations for the theoretically sound and practically useful completion of the required follow-up economic assessments specified in the MSFD
Class-Weighted Convolutional Features for Visual Instance Search
Image retrieval in realistic scenarios targets large dynamic datasets of
unlabeled images. In these cases, training or fine-tuning a model every time
new images are added to the database is neither efficient nor scalable.
Convolutional neural networks trained for image classification over large
datasets have been proven effective feature extractors for image retrieval. The
most successful approaches are based on encoding the activations of
convolutional layers, as they convey the image spatial information. In this
paper, we go beyond this spatial information and propose a local-aware encoding
of convolutional features based on semantic information predicted in the target
image. To this end, we obtain the most discriminative regions of an image using
Class Activation Maps (CAMs). CAMs are based on the knowledge contained in the
network and therefore, our approach, has the additional advantage of not
requiring external information. In addition, we use CAMs to generate object
proposals during an unsupervised re-ranking stage after a first fast search.
Our experiments on two public available datasets for instance retrieval,
Oxford5k and Paris6k, demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach
outperforming the current state-of-the-art when using off-the-shelf models
trained on ImageNet. The source code and model used in this paper are publicly
available at http://imatge-upc.github.io/retrieval-2017-cam/.Comment: To appear in the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), September
201
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