This easy-to-follow textbook provides a modern, algorithmic introduction to digital image processing. It concentrates on practical applications and working implementations whilst also presenting important formal details and the necessary mathematics.

Solving complex problems and selling their solutions is critical for personal and organizational success. For most of us, however, it doesn't come naturally and we haven't been taught how to do it well. Research shows a host of pitfalls trips us up when we try: We're quick to believe we understand a situation and jump to a flawed solution.

We seek to confirm our hypotheses and ignore conflicting evidence. We view challenges incompletely through the frameworks we know instead of with a fresh p...

Current research lays emphasis on exploring natural products for use in nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals to overcome various side effects of synthetic drugs. Fungi occupy an eminent position among natural sources of food and medicinal importance since ancient times. Many fungal species have been eaten as food and used in folk medicine for the treatment of many human ailments as mentioned in traditional medical literature.

However, scanty information is available pertaining to the nutraceuti...

Practical Pharmaceutics contains essential knowledge on the preparation, quality control, logistics, dispensing and use of medicines. It features chapters written by experienced pharmacists and scientists working in hospitals, academia and industry throughout Europe, including practical examples as well as information on current GMP and GMP-based guidelines and EU-legislation. In this second edition all chapters have been updated with numerous new as well as didactically revised illustrations...

Robotic vision, the combination of robotics and computer vision, involves the application of computer algorithms to data acquired from sensors. The research community has developed a large body of such algorithms but for a newcomer to the field this can be quite daunting. For over 20 years the author has maintained two open-source MATLAB (R) Toolboxes, one for robotics and one for vision.

They provide implementations of many important algorithms and allow users to work with real problems, not...

Awarded the Literature Prize of the VCIThis comprehensive textbook describes the synthesis, characterization and technical and engineering applications of polymers. Polymers are unique molecules and have properties different from any other class of materials. We encounter them in everyday life, not only in the form of the well-known, large-volume plastics such as PE or PP or the many other special polymers, some of which are very specifically modified but also in nature as polymeric biomolecu...

Familiar combinations of ingredients and processing make the structures that give food its properties. For example in ice cream, the emulsifiers and proteins stabilize partly crystalline milk fat as an emulsion, freezing (crystallization) of some of the water gives the product its hardness and polysaccharide stabilizers keep it smooth. Why different recipes work as they do is largely governed by the rules of physical chemistry.

This textbook introduces the physical chemistry essential to unde...

This student-friendly textbook encourages the development of programming skills through active practice by focusing on exercises that support hands-on learning. The Python Workbook provides a compendium of 186 exercises, spanning a variety of academic disciplines and everyday situations. Solutions to selected exercises are also provided, supported by brief annotations that explain the technique used to solve the problem, or highlight a specific point of Python syntax.

This enhanced new editio...

Ensuring optimal diets and nutrition for the global population is a grand challenge fraught with many contentious issues. To achieve food security for all and protect health, we need functional, equitable, and sustainable food systems. Food systems are highly complex networks of individuals and institutions that depend on governance and policy leadership. This book explains how interconnected food systems and policies affect diets and nutrition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In ...

This book offers a practical guide for policy advisors and their managers, grounded in the author's extensive experience as a senior policy practitioner in New Zealand's Westminster-style system of government. A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving.

Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with ca...