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In the era of internet access, recommender systems try to alleviate the difficulty consumers face while trying to find items (e.g. services, products, or information) that better match their needs. To do so, a recommender system selects and proposes (possibly unknown) items that may be of interest to some candidate consumer, by predicting her/his preference for this item. Given the diversity of needs between consumers and the enormous variety of items to be recommended, a large set of approaches have been proposed by the research community. This paper provides a review of the approaches proposed in the entire research area of content-based recommender systems, and not only in one part of it. To facilitate understanding, we provide a categorization of each approach based on the tools and techniques employed, which results to the main contribution of this paper, a content-based recommender systems taxonomy. This way, the reader acquires a quick and complete understanding of this research area. Finally, we provide a comparison of content-based recommender systems according to their ability to efficiently handle well-known drawbacks.

We propose a novel unsupervised semantic segmentation method for fast and accurate flood area detection utilizing color images acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully unsupervised method for flood area segmentation in color images captured by UAVs, without the need of pre-disaster images. The proposed framework addresses the problem of flood segmentation based on parameter-free calculated masks and unsupervised image analysis techniques. First, a fully unsupervised algorithm gradually excludes areas classified as non-flood, utilizing calculated masks over each component of the LAB colorspace, as well as using an RGB vegetation index and the detected edges of the original image. Unsupervised image analysis techniques, such as distance transform, are then applied, producing a probability map for the location of flooded areas. Finally, flood detection is obtained by applying hysteresis thresholding segmentation. The proposed method is tested and compared with variations and other supervised methods in two public datasets, consisting of 953 color images in total, yielding high-performance results, with 87.4% and 80.9% overall accuracy and F1-score, respectively. The results and computational efficiency of the proposed method show that it is suitable for onboard data execution and decision-making during UAV flights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scope of the present work is to apply modern methods of pattern recognition concerning the automatic detection of geomorphological features (curvilinear lineaments and topographic highs), with emphasis on geological faults and to compare the results of the automatic detection with aerial photographs and further geological data collected in Tinos Island. The contribution of this work in the geosciences is multidisciplinary because (a) it proposes to geoscientists a new tool of geomorphological analysis prior to the fieldwork and especially at the stage where published work and already available data are collected, evaluated and reprocessed, (b) it increases the detection accuracy of the geological features both prior and after the fieldwork, (c) it decreases the time of fieldwork and consequently the cost of the entire geological research and (d) it can be applied in digital elevation data. The automatically detected linear-curvilinear lineaments and topographic highs agree in location, shape and orientation with the ground truth data (geological maps, aerial photographs and field measurements). Furthermore, the shape and the orientation of the most prominent topographic high (Tsiknias) seems to be related to the tectonic regime in the wide area of study corresponding to the ENE-WSW, WSW-ESE, N-S and E-W trending normal faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]