This book provides readers with a selection of high-quality chapters that cover both theoretical concepts and practical applications of image feature detectors and descriptors. It serves as reference for researchers and practitioners by featuring survey chapters and research contributions on image feature detectors and descriptors. Additionally, it emphasizes several keywords in both theoretical and practical aspects of image feature extraction. The keywords include acceleration of feature detection and extraction, hardware implantations, image segmentation, evolutionary algorithm, ordinal measures, as well as visual speech recognition.

This book aims to present a viable alternative to the Hopfield Neural Network (HNN) model for analog computation. It is well known the standard HNN suffers from problems of convergence to local minima, and requirement of a large number of neurons and synaptic weights. Therefore, improved solutions are needed. The non-linear synapse neural network (NoSyNN) is one such possibility and is discussed in detail in this book. This book also discusses the applications in computationally intensive tasks like graph coloring, ranking, and linear as well as quadratic programming. The material in the book is useful to students, researchers and academician working in the area of analog computation.

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) now provide mature optimization tools that have successfully been applied to many problems, from designing antennas to complete robots, and provided many human-competitive results. In robotics, the integration of EAs within the engineer's toolbox made tremendous progress in the last 20 years and proposes new methods to address challenging problems in various setups: modular robotics, swarm robotics, robotics with non-conventional mechanics (e.g. high redundancy, dynamic motion, multi-modality), etc. This book takes its roots in the workshop on "New Horizons in Evolutionary Design of Robots" that brought together researchers from Computer Science and Robotics during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-2009) in Saint Louis (USA). This book features extended contributions from the workshop, thus providing various examples of current problems and applications, with a special emphasis on the link between Computer Science and Robotics. It also provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Evolutionary Robotics after 20 years of maturation as well as thoughts and considerations from several major actors in the field. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the current trends and challenges in Evolutionary Robotics for the next decade.

An Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) "Data Fusion Technologies for Harbour Protection" was held in Tallinn, Estonia 27 June-1 July, 2005. This workshop was organized by request of the NATO Security Through Science Programme and the Defence Investment Division. An ARW is one of many types of funded group support mechanisms established by the NATO Science Committee to contribute to the critical assessment of existing knowledge on new important topics, to identify directions for future research, and to promote close working relationships between scientists from different countries and with different professional experiences. The NATO Science Committee was approved at a meeting of the Heads of Government of the Alliance in December 1957, subsequent to the 1956 recommendation of "Three Wise Men" - Foreign Ministers Lange (Norway), Martino (Italy) and Pearson (Canada) on Non-Military Cooperation in NATO. The NATO Science Committee established the NATO Science Programme in 1958 to encourage and support scientific collaboration between individual scientists and to foster scientific development in its member states. In 1999, following the end of the Cold War, the Science Programme was transformed so that support is now devoted to collaboration between Partner-country and NATO-country scientists or to contributing towards research support in Partner countries. Since 2004, the Science Programme was further modified to focus exclusively on NATO Priority Research Topics (i. e. Defence Against Terrorism or Countering Other Threats to Security) and also preferably on a Partner country priority area.

Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) are the physical embodiment of machine intelligence providing a core concept for integrating various advanced techno- gies with pattern recognition and learning. The basic philosophy of IAS research is to explore and understand the nature of intelligence in problems of perception, reasoning, learning and control in order to develop and implement the theory to engineered realization. In other words, the objective is to formulate various me- odologies for the development of robots which can operate autonomously and exhibit intelligent behavior by making appropriate decisions to perform the right task at the right time. Since IAS basically deals with the integration of machines, computing, sensing, and software to create intelligent systems capable of intera- ing with the complexities of the real world, advanced topics like soft computing, artificial life, evolutionary biology, and cognitive psychology have great promise in improving its intelligence and performance. Because of the inter-disciplinary character, the subject has several challenging issues for research, design and development covering a number of disciplines. These issues are further concerned with the development of both technology and methodology apart from various operations. The present research monograph titled "Intelligent Autonomous Systems: Foundations and Applications", edited by two renowned researchers, Professor Dilip K. Pratihar of IIT, Kharagpur, India and Professor Lakhmi C. Jain, Univ- sity of South Australia, Australia, provides a fairly representative cross-section of the activities that is going on all over the world in this area.

Statistical implicative analysis is a data analysis method created by Regis Gras almost thirty years ago which has a significant impact on a variety of areas ranging from pedagogical and psychological research to data mining. Statistical implicative analysis (SIA) provides a framework for evaluating the strength of implications; such implications are formed through common knowledge acquisition techniques in any learning process, human or artificial. This new concept has developed into a unifying methodology, and has generated a powerful convergence of thought between mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, specialists in pedagogy and last, but not least, computer scientists specialized in data mining.

This volume collects significant research contributions of several rather distinct disciplines that benefit from SIA. Contributions range from psychological and pedagogical research, bioinformatics, knowledge management, and data mining.

Intuitive consciousness/ wisdom is also one of the frontline areas in soft computing, which has to be always cultivated by meditation. This book is an introduction to some new fields in soft computing with its principal components of fuzzy logic, ANN and EA and it is hoped that it would be quite useful to study the fundamental concepts on these topics for the pursuit of allied research.

The approach in this book is to provides an understanding of the soft computing field, to work through soft computing using examples, to integrate pseudo - code operational summaries and Matlab codes, to present computer simulation, to include real world applications and to highlight the distinctive work of human consciousness in machine.

"I believe the chapters would help in understanding not only the basic issues and characteristic features of soft computing, but also the aforesaid problems of CTP and in formulating possible solutions. Dr. Chaturvedi deserves congratulations for bringing out the nice piece of work." Sankar K. Pal, Director Indian Statistical Institute

The book Intelligent Systems in Science and Information 2014 is the carefully edited collection of 25 extended chapters from selected papers in the field of Computational Intelligence that , which received highly recommended feedback during the Science and Information Conference (SAI) 2014 review process. All chapters have gone through substantial extension and consolidation and were subject to another round of rigorous review and additional modification and represent the state of the art of the cutting-edge research and technologies in the related areas.

The chapters of the book are evolved from presentations made by selected participants at the 2005 BISC International Special Event, held at the University of California at Berkely. The papers include reports from the different front of soft computing in various industries and address the problems of different fields of research in fuzzy logic, fuzzy set and soft computing. The book provides a collection of forty-four articles in two volumes.

This book provides an overview of model-based environmental visual perception for humanoid robots. The visual perception of a humanoid robot creates a bidirectional bridge connecting sensor signals with internal representations of environmental objects. The objective of such perception systems is to answer two fundamental questions: What & where is it? To answer these questions using a sensor-to-representation bridge, coordinated processes are conducted to extract and exploit cues matching robot's mental representations to physical entities. These include sensor & actuator modeling, calibration, filtering, and feature extraction for state estimation. This book discusses the following topics in depth: * Active Sensing: Robust probabilistic methods for optimal, high dynamic range image acquisition are suitable for use with inexpensive cameras. This enables ideal sensing in arbitrary environmental conditions encountered in human-centric spaces. The book quantitatively shows the importance of equipping robots with dependable visual sensing. * Feature Extraction & Recognition: Parameter-free, edge extraction methods based on structural graphs enable the representation of geometric primitives effectively and efficiently. This is done by eccentricity segmentation providing excellent recognition even on noisy & low-resolution images. Stereoscopic vision, Euclidean metric and graph-shape descriptors are shown to be powerful mechanisms for difficult recognition tasks. * Global Self-Localization & Depth Uncertainty Learning: Simultaneous feature matching for global localization and 6D self-pose estimation are addressed by a novel geometric and probabilistic concept using intersection of Gaussian spheres. The path from intuition to the closed-form optimal solution determining the robot location is described, including a supervised learning method for uncertainty depth modeling based on extensive ground-truth training data from a motion capture system. The methods and experiments are presented in self-contained chapters with comparisons and the state of the art. The algorithms were implemented and empirically evaluated on two humanoid robots: ARMAR III-A & B. The excellent robustness, performance and derived results received an award at the IEEE conference on humanoid robots and the contributions have been utilized for numerous visual manipulation tasks with demonstration at distinguished venues such as ICRA, CeBIT, IAS, and Automatica.

This book discusses how to build optimization tools able to generate better future studies. It aims at showing how these tools can be used to develop an adaptive learning environment that can be used for decision making in the presence of uncertainties. The book starts with existing fuzzy techniques and multicriteria decision making approaches and shows how to combine them in more effective tools to model future events and take therefore better decisions. The first part of the book is dedicated to the theories behind fuzzy optimization and fuzzy cognitive map, while the second part presents new approaches developed by the authors with their practical application to trend impact analysis, scenario planning and strategic formulation. The book is aimed at two groups of readers, interested in linking the future studies with artificial intelligence. The first group includes social scientists seeking for improved methods for strategic prospective. The second group includes computer scientists and engineers seeking for new applications and current developments of Soft Computing methods for forecasting in social science, but not limited to this.

This book focuses on all aspects of complex automated negotiations, which are studied in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. This book consists of two parts. I: Agent-Based Complex Automated Negotiations and II: Automated Negotiation Agents Competition. The chapters in Part I are extended versions of papers presented at the 2012 international workshop on Agent-Based Complex Automated Negotiation (ACAN), after peer reviews by three Program Committee members. Part II examines in detail ANAC 2012 (The Third Automated Negotiating Agents Competition), in which automated agents that have different negotiation strategies and are implemented by different developers are automatically negotiated in the several negotiation domains. ANAC is an international competition in which automated negotiation strategies, submitted by a number of universities and research institutes across the world, are evaluated in tournament style. The purpose of the competition is to steer the research in the area of bilateral multi-issue, closed negotiation. This book also includes the rules, results, agents and domain descriptions for ANAC 2011 as submitted by the organizers and finalists.

The present book includes a set of selected extended papers from the 11th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2014), held in Vienna, Austria, from 1 to 3 September 2014. The conference brought together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the application of informatics to Control, Automation and Robotics. Four simultaneous tracks will be held, covering Intelligent Control Systems, Optimization, Robotics, Automation, Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modelling and Control, and Industrial Engineering, Production and Management. Informatics applications are pervasive in many areas of Control, Automation and Robotics. ICINCO 2014 received 301 submissions, from 49 countries, in all continents. After a double blind paper review performed by the Program Committee, 20% were accepted as full papers and thus selected for oral presentation. Additional papers were accepted as short papers and posters. A further selection was made after the Conference, based also on the assessment of presentation quality and audience interest, so that this book includes the extended and revised versions of the very best papers of ICINCO 2014. Commitment to high quality standards is a major concern of ICINCO that will be maintained in the next editions, considering not only the stringent paper acceptance ratios but also the quality of the program committee, keynote lectures, participation level and logistics.

This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art in and availability of commercial systems and open datasets/open source software, individual chapters focus on specific aspects of one of the biometric modalities, including questions of usability, security, and privacy. The book features contributions from both academia and major industrial manufacturers.

This book is a delight for academics, researchers and professionals working in evolutionary and swarm computing, computational intelligence, machine learning and engineering design, as well as search and optimization in general. It provides an introduction to the design and development of a number of popular and recent swarm and evolutionary algorithms with a focus on their applications in engineering problems in diverse domains. The topics discussed include particle swarm optimization, the artificial bee colony algorithm, Spider Monkey optimization algorithm, genetic algorithms, constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming, and evolutionary fuzzy systems. A friendly and informative treatment of the topics makes this book an ideal reference for beginners and those with experience alike.

Dynamic programming is an efficient technique for solving optimization problems. It is based on breaking the initial problem down into simpler ones and solving these sub-problems, beginning with the simplest ones. A conventional dynamic programming algorithm returns an optimal object from a given set of objects. This book develops extensions of dynamic programming, enabling us to (i) describe the set of objects under consideration; (ii) perform a multi-stage optimization of objects relative to different criteria; (iii) count the number of optimal objects; (iv) find the set of Pareto optimal points for bi-criteria optimization problems; and (v) to study relationships between two criteria. It considers various applications, including optimization of decision trees and decision rule systems as algorithms for problem solving, as ways for knowledge representation, and as classifiers; optimization of element partition trees for rectangular meshes, which are used in finite element methods for solving PDEs; and multi-stage optimization for such classic combinatorial optimization problems as matrix chain multiplication, binary search trees, global sequence alignment, and shortest paths. The results presented are useful for researchers in combinatorial optimization, data mining, knowledge discovery, machine learning, and finite element methods, especially those working in rough set theory, test theory, logical analysis of data, and PDE solvers. This book can be used as the basis for graduate courses.

Ambient Intelligence is a vision of the future where the world will be surrounded by electronic environments sensitive and responsive to people, wherein devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, in an easy and natural way.

This edited volume is based on the workshop Multimedia Techniques for Ambient Intelligence (MTDAI08), held in Mogliano Veneto, Italy in March 2008. Contributed by world renowned leaders in the field from academia and industry, this volume is dedicated to research on technologies used to improve the intelligence capability of multimedia devices for imaging, image processing and computer vision. Focuses on recent developments in digital signal processing, including evolutions in audiovisual signal processing, analysis, coding and authentication, and retrieval techniques.

Designed for researchers and professionals, this book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

Network models are critical tools in business, management, science and industry. "Network Models and Optimization" presents an insightful, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of multiple objective genetic algorithms to network optimization problems in many disciplines, such as engineering, computer science, operations research, transportation, telecommunication, and manufacturing. The book extensively covers algorithms and applications, including shortest path problems, minimum cost flow problems, maximum flow problems, minimum spanning tree problems, traveling salesman and postman problems, location-allocation problems, project scheduling problems, multistage-based scheduling problems, logistics network problems, communication network problem, and network models in assembly line balancing problems, and airline fleet assignment problems. The book can be used both as a student textbook and as a professional reference for practitioners who use network optimization methods to model and solve problems.

This book shows how the various paradigms of computational intelligence, employed either singly or in combination, can produce an effective structure for obtaining often vital information from ECG signals. The text is self-contained, addressing concepts, methodology, algorithms, and case studies and applications, providing the reader with the necessary background augmented with step-by-step explanation of the more advanced concepts. It is structured in three parts: Part I covers the fundamental ideas of computational intelligence together with the relevant principles of data acquisition, morphology and use in diagnosis; Part II deals with techniques and models of computational intelligence that are suitable for signal processing; and, Part III details ECG system-diagnostic interpretation and knowledge acquisition architectures. Illustrative material includes: brief numerical experiments; and, detailed schemes, exercises and more advanced problems.

Agent-based modeling/simulation is an emerging field that uses bottom-up and experimental analysis in the social sciences. Selected research from that presented at the Third International Workshop on Agent-Based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems 2004, held in May 2004 in Kyoto, Japan, is included in this book. The aim of the workshop was to employ the bottom-up approach to social and economic problems by modeling, simulation, and analysis using a software agent. This research area is an emerging interdisciplinary field among the social sciences and computer science, attracting broad attention because it introduces a simulation-based experimental approach to problems that are becoming increasingly complex in an era of globalization and innovation in information technology. The state-of-the-art research and findings presented in this book will be indispensable tools for anyone involved in this rapidly growing discipline.

Sound waves propagate through various media, and allow communication or entertainment for us, humans. Music we hear or create can be perceived in such aspects as rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, or mood. All these elements of music can be of interest for users of music information retrieval systems. Since vast music repositories are available for everyone in everyday use (both in private collections, and in the Internet), it is desirable and becomes necessary to browse music collections by contents. Therefore, music information retrieval can be potentially of interest for every user of computers and the Internet. There is a lot of research performed in music information retrieval domain, and the outcomes, as well as trends in this research, are certainly worth popularizing. This idea motivated us to prepare the book on Advances in Music Information Retrieval.

It is divided into four sections: MIR Methods and Platforms, Harmony, Music Similarity, and Content Based Identification and Retrieval. Glossary of basic terms is given at the end of the book, to familiarize readers with vocabulary referring to music information retrieval.

One of the most challenging issues for the intelligent decision systems is to effectively manage the large-scale complex distributed environments such as computational clouds, grids, ad hoc and P2P networks, under the different types of users, their relations, and real-world uncertainties. In this context the IT resources and services usually belong to different owners (institutions, enterprises, or individuals) and are managed by different administrators. These administrators conform to different sets of rules and configuration directives, and can impose different usage policies on the system users. Additionally, uncertainties are presented in various types of information that are incomplete, imprecise, fragmentary or overloading, which hinders the full and precise determination of the evaluation criteria, their subsequent and selection, the assignment scores, and eventually the final integrated decision result.

This book presents new ideas, analysis, implementations and evaluation of the next generation intelligent techniques for solving complex decision problems in large-scale distributed systems. In 15 chapters several important formulations of the decision problems in heterogeneous environments are identified and a review of the recent approaches, from game theoretical models and computational intelligent techniques, such as genetic, memetic and evolutionary algorithms, to intelligent multi-agent systems and networking are presented. We believe that this volume will serve as a reference for the students, researchers and industry practitioners working in or are interested in joining interdisciplinary works in the areas of intelligent decision systems using emergent distributed computing paradigms. It will also allow newcomers to grasp key concerns and potential solutions on the selected topics."

This monograph is devoted to the theory and development of autonomous navigation of mobile robots using computer vision based sensing mechanism. The conventional robot navigation systems, utilizing traditional sensors like ultrasonic, IR, GPS, laser sensors etc., suffer several drawbacks related to either the physical limitations of the sensor or incur high cost. Vision sensing has emerged as a popular alternative where cameras can be used to reduce the overall cost, maintaining high degree of intelligence, flexibility and robustness.

This book includes a detailed description of several new approaches for real life vision based autonomous navigation algorithms and SLAM. It presents the concept of how subgoal based goal-driven navigation can be carried out using vision sensing. The development concept of vision based robots for path/line tracking using fuzzy logic is presented, as well as how a low-cost robot can be indigenously developed in the laboratory with microcontroller based sensor systems. The book describes successful implementation of integration of low-cost, external peripherals, with off-the-shelf procured robots. An important highlight of the book is that it presents a detailed, step-by-step sample demonstration of how vision-based navigation modules can be actually implemented in real life, under 32-bit Windows environment. The book also discusses the concept of implementing vision based SLAM employing a two camera based system.

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