Abstract
AVHRR data from April 1995 to September 1995 have been processed to produce 1 km resolution NDVI Maximum Value Composites of Scotland. Temporal profiles of mean NDVI were obtained for Scottish administrative regions. Temporal NDVI profiles for individual vegetation classes, from the Land Cover of Scotland 1988 (LCS88) dataset, were obtained and both temporal and spatial variations within these classes are also discussed. A method for enhancing the existing LCS88 dataset is proposed, based on AVHRR NDVI data, by distinguishing vegetation regional variation within a single class.

Abstract
The Department of Biology of the University of Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro analyses every year a large number of chestnut-tree leaves, in order to measure their biometric characteristics, namely the leaf area, dimensions of the enclosing rectangle, number of teeth and secondary veins. Because for a human operator this is a time consuming and error prone task, a computer vision system has been set up to improve the process. The task of measuring the leaf presents no major problems, while counting the number of teeth and secondary veins has proved to be complex at the resolutions used. This paper describes the state of the project, going into some detail on the algorithms. A complete system has been assembled, based on an PC connected to an imaging system. A windows-based application has been developed, which integrates the control of the operations to grab, store and analyse images of different varieties of chestnut-tree leaves in an organised way. Because the accuracy of the computer vision algorithms used is not sufficient for the system to be completely autonomous, a semi-automatic solution has been adopted. The operator validates or corrects the results of the automatic analysis. This solution leads to a significant improvement in the performance of the human operator, both in terms of speed and quality of the results.

Abstract
In this paper, we study the relationship between tabulation and goal-oriented bottom-up evaluation of logic programs, Differences emerge when one tries to identify features of one evaluation method in the other. We show that to obtain the same effect as tabulation in top-down evaluation, one has to perform a careful adomment in programs to be evaluated bottom-up. Furthermore, we propose an efficient algorithm to perform forward subsumption checking over adorned magic facts. (C) Elsevier Science Inc., 1997.

Abstract
In this article, we present the design and development of a localisation system for a mobile autonomous platform. The purpose of this system is to endow this vehicle with the capability of maintaining a position estimate in real time without artificial aids in a structured environment. Each position estimate is generated from the previous one with information obtained from the on board sensors as well as from the world model. Process and observation models are built in such a way that take into account the physical restrictions of the vehicle and its ultra-sonic sonars. All the stages of the Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF) process applied to the vehicle of interest are described. To increase the performance of the sonar data real time acquisition, a method based on entropy choosing the sonar observation in order to minimise the uncertainty of the position estimate is used. An adaptive process of matching the sonar observation decreasing the possibility of loss of the vehicle is also chosen. Satisfactory results showing the good performance of this localisation system are presented.

Abstract
In this paper, we consider the concept of the impact of an action or human error. We begin from an informal definition of impact as: • the effect that an action or sequence of actions has on the safe and successful operation of a system; • and develop a quantitative measure of the impact of specified behaviours. It is important that human-machine interface designers should understand the relationship between operator actions and the hazards associated with a system. We demonstrate how impact can be assessed prior to, or in parallel with, the design of the human-machine interface, and show how impact assessments could be used to allow risk analysts to inform designers about the relationship between operator actions and system hazards. To illustrate our approach we present a simple case study.

Abstract