How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality

In modernity, failure was the discourse of critique, today, it is increasingly the discourse of power: failure has changed its allegiances. Over the last two decades, failure has been enfolded into discourses of power, facilitating the development of new policy approaches. Foremost among governing approaches that seek to include and to govern through failure is that of resilience. This article seeks to reflect upon how the understanding of failure has become transformed in this process, particularly linking this transformation to the radical appreciation of contingency and of the limits to instrumental cause-and-effect approaches to rule. Whereas modernity was shaped by a contestation over failure as an epistemological boundary, under conditions of contingency and complexity there appears to be a new consensus on failure as an ontological necessity. This problematic ‘ontological turn’ is illustrated using examples of changing approaches to risks, especially anthropogenic understandings of environmental threats, formerly seen as ‘natural’.

Image, video and 3D data registration: medical, satellite and video processing applications with quality metrics

Data registration refers to a series of techniques for matching or bringing similar objects or datasets together into alignment. These techniques enjoy widespread use in a diverse variety of applications, such as video coding, tracking, object and face detection and recognition, surveillance and satellite imaging, medical image analysis and structure from motion. Registration methods are as numerous as their manifold uses, from pixel level and block or feature based methods to Fourier domain methods. This book is focused on providing algorithms and image and video techniques for registration and quality performance metrics. The authors provide various assessment metrics for measuring registration quality alongside analyses of registration techniques, introducing and explaining both familiar and state–of–the–art registration methodologies used in a variety of targeted applications.