TOPICS IN SPATIAL STATISTICS

An overview is given over a fair range of topics within spatial and sp atial-temporal statistics. The theory presented is motivated by and il lustrated with actual applications to real world problems. We describe and discuss models for three basic types of spatial processes: contin uous random surfaces, mosaic phenomena, and events-against-background processes. Various combinations of these sometimes occur naturally in applications, like Gaussian noise on top of a Markov random field in i mage restoration problems, Some of these combinations are also discuss ed, The applications we discuss are drawn from the areas of medical im age analysis, pollution monitoring, characterisation of oil reservoirs , estimation of fish and whale stock, forestry surveillance via satell ite, statistical meteorology, and symbol recognition,