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Spectral similarities and spatial adjacencies between various kinds of objects, shadow, and occluded areas behind high-rise objects as well as the complex relationships between various object types lead to the difficulties and ambiguities in object recognition in urban areas. Using a knowledge base containing the contextual information together with the multiviews imagery may improve the object recognition results in such a situation. The proposed object recognition strategy in this paper has two main stages: single view and multiviews processes. In the single view process, defining region's properties for each of the segmented regions, the object-based image analysis (OBIA) is performed independently on the individual views. In the second stage, the classified objects of all views are fused together through a decision-level fusion based on the scene contextual information in order to refine the classification results. Sensory information, analyzing visibility maps, height, and the structural characteristics of the multiviews classified objects define the scene contextual information. Evaluation of the capabilities of the proposed context aware object recognition methodology is performed on two datasets: 1) multiangular Worldview-2 satellite images over Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and 2) multiviews digital modular camera (DMC) aerial images over a complex urban area in Germany. The obtained results represent that using the contextual information together with a decision-level fusion of multiviews, the object recognition difficulties and ambiguities are decreased and the overall accuracy and the kappa are gradually improved for both of the WorldView-2 and the DMC datasets.

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The pathogenic roles of Interleukine-16 (IL-16), CCL27, tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), and B-cell activating factor (BAFF) has been shown in some autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. We aimed to correlate the circulatory changes of such factors with the severity of disease in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). This case-control study was conducted on 84 MS patients and 83 healthy controls. We measured the serum levels of IL-16, CCL27, TRAIL, and BAFF in all participants by enzyme-linked immune sorbent assay. Using the expanded disability status scale (EDSS), we evaluated the severity of MS. Finally, we assessed the correlation between serum levels of such factors with the severity of MS. We found increased serum levels of CCL27, IL-16, and BAFF in patients with MS compared to those in healthy subjects. However, no difference was found in serum levels of TRAIL between the patients and controls. In addition, a significant positive correlation between serum levels of CCL27, IL-16, TRAIL, and BAFF with disease severity according to EDSS score was determined. We showed higher serum levels of CCL27, BAFF, TRAIL, and IL-16 in MS patients with more severe disabilities than mild forms. Such finding may represent their contribution to the pathogenesis of MS. Blocking such molecules may yield new treatments for MS.