Knowledge-based segmentation of SAR data with learned priors

©2000 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/83.821747An approach for the segmentation of still and video synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is described in this note. A priori knowledge about the objects present in the image, e.g., target, shadow, and background terrain, is introduced via Bayes' rule. Posterior probabilities obtained in this way are then anisotropically smoothed, and the image segmentation is obtained via MAP classifications of the smoothed data. When segmenting sequences of images, the smoothed posterior probabilities of past frames are used to learn the prior distributions in the succeeding frame. We show with examples from public data sets that this method provides an efficient and fast technique for addressing the segmentation of SAR data

Interests, Rights and Standards of Care in the Context of Globalized Medicine

Historically speaking, medical ethics responded to the ideological misuse of scientific (or pseudo- scientific) research and gave priority to the individual patient’s right to be respected in any medical intervention. This right has been confirmed in several guidelines, from the Helsinki Declaration to the European Oviedo Convention of Human Rights in Biomedicine and many professional ethics codices. For most works on medical ethics, the right of the patients is spelled out as respect for their interests, justified by freedom as basis of autonomy, moral agency, and a modern understanding of the individuals’ right to decide on questions of their (good) lives. Physicians’ duties, then, are constrained by the freedom rights, and they are to justify any intervention in light of the patients’ own understanding and concept of the good life. Successful communication (or doctor-patient- relationship) will result in the free and informed consent to a medical intervention – without it, the intervention would be considered morally wrong. Over the last few decades, informed consent formulas have become a kind of magic formula to guarantee patients’ rights. However, given the bureaucratic environment of modern medicine, it was not long that lack of time to engage in a long communication turned the thoroughly reflected ‘free and informed consent’ into a very matter-of- fact standardized form – merely to be signed by the patient in order to make the operational sequences of medical action as effective as possible

Towards a Decolonial Narrative Ethics

This essay explores the contribution of two works of German literature to a decolonial narrative ethics. It analyzes the structures of colonialism, taking narratives as a medium of and for ethical reflection, and reinterprets the ethical concepts of recognition and responsibility. This essay examines two stories. Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy (1917) addresses the biological racism of the German scientists around 1900, unmasking the racism that renders apes (or particular people) the pre-life of human beings (or particular human beings). It also demonstrates that the politics of recognition, based on conditional (mis-)recognition, must be replaced by an ethics of mutual recognition. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978) uses the cross-reference of history and fiction as an aesthetic principle, narrating the history of the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people at the beginning of the 20th century. Intercultural understanding, the novel shows, is impossible when it is based on the conditional, colonial (mis-)recognition that echoes Kafka’s unmasking; furthermore, the novel illuminates the interrelation of recognition and responsibility that requires not only an aesthetic ethics of reading based on attentiveness and response but also a political ethics that confronts the (German) readers as historically situated agents who must take responsibility for their pas

Compassion und eine prophetische Ethik des Friedens

The current times are characterized in all regions of the world by violence, (civil) war, terrorism and various exclusions due to gender, social, religious or ethical affiliation. In Latin America, the time of the civil war continues to openly or covertly. Violence in the form of crime, drug wars and the Mara (youth gangs) involved in them and, above all, violence against women are a growing threat. Peace is increasingly fragile.Despite the practical commitment of Christians, peace theology is a desideratum, even in Latin America, although the theories of liberation offer starting points.Given these challenges, this book focuses on the question of fragile peace. The authors lay out slopes for a peace theology in a feminist liberation theological and intercultural perspective and the foundations for a new presence of the Christian in public space - in the service of a »good life«, human rights and intercultural peace work. A multifaceted plea to open up new ways of a peace-space theology and to fill it with life

Illness Narratives in Ethical Counseling

Illness narratives, patients’ stories about their experiences of illness, have gained a reputation as a scientific domain in medicine in the last thirty years. Patients’ stories about living with an illness, diagnostic procedures and treatments, encounters with medical institutions and its impact on their private and social life have been considered as an important access to their meaning-making and coping endeavours. They also play an important role in doctor-patient communication and the development of a healing relationship. This book aims at sensitizing professionals who use illness narratives in the field of medicine for their problems, challenges, and chances. In what ways should scholars of narratives respond to such uses? We argue that the use of narratives in applied contexts raises many questions about what kind of tools they are and what epistemological foundations, communicational properties and pragmatic effects they comprise when they are shifted from research material to clinical or educational and instructive instruments in various domains. This raises ethical concern and reflections. The book brings together scholars from various disciplines across clinical and theoretical fields. They give impressive examples how illness narratives can be used in many practical domains, and reflect on the chances as well as on the methodological or epistemological assumptions and challenges which are inevitably connected with the use of narratives as clinical, educational, or informative tools