This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Visual Content Processing and Representation, VLBV 2005. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 4 panel summaries were selected from 85 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers address all current issues in visual content processing techniques such as video and image analysis, representation and coding, communications and delivery, consumption, synthesis, protection, and adaptation.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Implementing viscous dampers in high-rise buildings has proven to be an efficient structural way to control interstory drift and accelerations in buildings undergoing wind and earthquake excitations. However, the cost of this implementation sometimes turns to be prohibitive or too high. As a possible more economic solution, this paper introduces the use of a semi-active device to approach this kind of problems. A 39 story building computer model is fully developed. Static and dynamic characteristics of the model obtained are compared with the data obtained from the original design and the wind tunnel results in order to show the accuracy of the computer model. Finally, a comparative study of the efficiency of Modified Friction device and passive dampers under wind excitation is carried out.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

This monograph especially emphasises the importance of the scope, by which forest fires, from year to year endanger the environment, including casualties. Fire seized areas in 2000 in Europe only were over 920,000 ha. Cases relating to relatively small locations, but which burned in unsettled areas, are often unidentified, because the satellite sensors have limited possibilities in the view of the size of the area they can detect. It is similar to those situations on the fires with relatively short temporal range, and during that interval thick clouds are above such area for example and other admixtures stirring the atmosphere. It is necessary to point out that all those fire seized places, spatially limited on smaller localities, often cause fire spreading by their wideness and a sort of a plant mass, relief and geologic surface, humidity and precipitation or by suitable combinations. On the other side, especially in the last few years, we are witnesses to events when fire has seized tens of thousands hectares just in a "wave", also penetrating through the urban areas.

CO2 capture from gaseous effluents is one of the great challenges faced by chemical and environmental engineering, as the increase of CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere is endangering the support of living species on this planet and might also be responsible for dramatic climate changes. Several capture technologies actually exist although the only proven and mature technology is, currently, chemical absorption using aqueous amine solutions, which still poses several technological and operational problems. Other concurrent technologies, such as adsorption and membrane, are in a less developed stage and require considerable research efforts to be viable industrial processes. Nevertheless, several alternatives exist for CO2 reutilisation as this is an abundant carbon source that could be easily used as a raw material for other carbon based raw materials, fuels and polymers. This book explores the problem of CO2 emissions and sequestration technologies, with a focus on recent scientific developments.