This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2007, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2007.

The 120 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 251 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on motion detection and tracking, medical imaging, biometrics, colour, curves and surfaces beyond two dimensions, reading characters, words, lines etc., image segmentation, shape, im age registration and matching, signal decomposition and invariants, as well as features and classification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Scale Space Methods and Variational Methods in Computer Vision, SSVM 2007, emanated from the joint edition of the 4th International Workshop on Variational, Geometric and Level Set Methods in Computer Vision, VLSM 2007 and the 6th International Conference on Scale Space and PDE Methods in Computer Vision, Scale-Space 2007, held in Ischia Italy, May/June 2007.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Coherence for Visual Motion Analysis, 2004, held in May 2004. The eleven revised full research papers presented went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers in this volume cover a wide range in the field of motion analysis that is a central problem in computer vision. The workshop examined techniques for integrating spatial coherence constraints during motion analysis of image sequences.

Comprises 25 revised full papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL 2005, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in July 2005. These represent the current state of the art of visual information processing, feature extraction and aggregation at semantic level and content-based retrieval, as well as the study of user intention in query processing, and issues of delivery and consumption of multimedia content.

This book uncovers the stakes and possibilities of handling pandemic diseases with the help of Computational Intelligence, using cases and applications from the current Covid-19 pandemic. The book chapters will focus on the application of CI and its related fields in managing different aspects of Covid-19, including modelling of the disease spread, data-driven prediction, identification of disease hotspots, and medical decision support.

Bjorn Gottfried introduces the notion of positional-contrast. It defines how patterns can be robustly dealt with. That is, the new representation distinguishes patterns by how they relate with regard to spatial relations. This notion can be applied for several purposes, including pattern recognition, motion analysis, and texture analysis.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP 2005). This conference - ries started about 20 years ago in Berlin. Initially, the conference served as a forum for meetings between scientists from Western and Eastern-block co- tries. Nowadays, the conference attracts participants from all over the world. The conference gives equal weight to posters and oral presentations, and the selected presentation mode is based on the most appropriate communication medium. The program follows a single-track format, rather than parallel s- sions. Non-overlapping oral and poster sessions ensure that all attendees have the opportunity to interact personally with presenters. As for the numbers, we received a total of 185 submissions. All papers were reviewed by two to four members of the Program Committee. The ?nal selection was carried out by the Conference Chairs. Out of the 185 papers, 65 were - lected for oral presentation and 43 as posters. CAIP is becoming well recognized internationally, and this year's presentations came from 26 di?erent countries. South Korea proved to be the most active scienti?cally with a total of 16 - cepted papers. At this point, we wish to thank the Program Committee and additional referees for their timely and high-quality reviews. The paper s- mission and review procedure was carried out electronically. We also thank the invited speakers Reinhardt Koch and Thomas Vetter for kindly accepting to present invited papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, ICVGIP 2006, held in Madurai, India, December 2006. Coverage in this volume includes image restoration and super-resolution, image filtering, visualization, tracking and surveillance, face-, gesture-, and object-recognition, compression, content based image retrieval, stereo/camera calibration, and biometrics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI/ECCV 2006.

The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers address a wide range of theoretical and application issues in human-computer interaction ranging from face analysis, gesture and emotion recognition, and event detection to various applications in those fields.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, computer vision made considerable progress towards the consolidation of its fundaments, in particular regarding the treatment of geometry for the evaluation of stereo image pairs and of multi-view image recordings. Scientists thus began to look at basic computer vision solutions - irrespective of the well-perceived need to perfection these further - as components which should be explored in a larger context.

This volume is a post-event proceedings volume and contains selected papers based on the presentations given, and the lively discussions that ensued, during a seminar held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in October 2003. Co-sponsored by ECVision, the cognitive vision network of excellence, it was organized to further strengthen cooperation between research groups from different countries, and scientists active in related areas were invited from around the world.

The 18 thoroughly revised papers presented are organized in topical sections on foundations of cognitive vision systems, recognition and categorization, learning and adaptation, representation and inference, control and systems integration, and conclusions.

With the realization that many clues and hints preceded the September 11 terrorist attacks, statisticians became an important part of the global war on terror. This book surveys emerging research at the intersection of national security and statistical sciences. In it, a diverse group of talented researchers address such topics as Syndromic Surveillance; Modeling and Simulation; Biometric Authentication; and Game Theory. The book includes general reviews of quantitative approaches to counterterrorism, for decision makers with policy backgrounds, as well as technical treatments of statistical issues that will appeal to quantitative researchers.

Object detection and recognition is a topic of significant interest in computer and robot vision. It is required in most applications of computational vision, for example, biometric systems, medical imaging, intelligent cars, factory automation, and image databases.

One of the major challenges in designing object recognition systems is to construct methods that are fast and capable of operating on standard computer platforms. The more developed such systems become, the more urgent becomes the need for a pre-selection system that enables subsequent processing to focus only on relevant data. One mechanism to achieve this is visual attention: it selects regions in a visual scene that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The field of visual attention is currently the focus of much research for both biological and artificial systems.

This monograph presents a complete computational system for visual attention and object detection: VOCUS (Visual Object detection with a CompUtational attention System) is a system capable of automatically selecting regions of interest in images and detecting specific objects. It represents a major step forward on integrating data-driven and model-driven information into a single framework. Additionally, the volume contains an extensive review of the literature on visual attention, detailed evaluations of VOCUS in different settings, and applications of the system in the context of object recognition and robotics.

Inrecentresearchoncomputervisionsystems, attentionhasbeenplayingacrucialrolein mediatingbottom-upandtop-downpathsofinformationprocessing. Inappliedresearch, the development of enabling technologies such as miniaturized mobile sensors, video surveillance systems, and ambient intelligence systems involves the real-time analysis of enormous quantities of data. Knowledge has to be applied about what needs to be attendedto, andwhen, andwhattodoinameaningfulsequence, incorrespondencewith visual feedback. Methods on attention and control are mandatory to render computer vision systems more robust. The 2nd International Workshop on Attention and Performance in Computational Vision (WAPCV 2004) was held in the Czech Technical University of Prague, Czech Republic, as an associated workshop of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion (ECCV 2004). The goal of this workshop was to provide an interdisciplinary forum tocommunicatecomputationalmodelsofvisualattentionfromvariousviewpoints, such as from computer vision, psychology, robotics and neuroscience. The motivation for - terdisciplinarity was communication and inspiration beyond the individual community, to focus discussion on computational modelling, to outline relevant objectives for p- formance comparison, to explore promising application domains, and to discuss these with reference to all related aspects of cognitive vision. The workshop was held as a single-day, single-track event, consisting of high-quality podium and poster presen- tions. Invited talks were given by John K. Tsotsos about attention and feature binding in biologically motivated computer vision and by Gustavo Deco about the context of attention, memory and reward from the perspective of computational neuroscience. The interdisciplinary program committee was composed of 21 internationally r- ognized researc

The world is full of objects, many of which are visible to us as surfaces. Examples are people, cars, machines, computers and bananas. Exceptions are such things as clouds and trees, which have a more detailed, fuzzy structure. Computer vision aims to detect and reconstruct features of surfaces from the images produced by cameras, in some ways mimicking the way in which humans reconstruct features of the world around them by using their eyes. This book describes how the 3D shape of surfaces can be recovered from image sequences of outlines. Cipolla and Giblin provide all the necessary background in differential geometry (assuming knowledge of elementary algebra and calculus) and in the analysis of visual motion, and emphasizes intuitive visual understanding of the geometric techniques with computer-generated illustrations. They also give a thorough introduction to the mathematical techniques and the details of the implementations, and apply the methods to data from real images.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lies at the crossroads of many scienti?c areas including arti?cial intelligence, computer vision, face recognition, motion tracking, etc. In order for HCI systems to interact seamlessly with people, they need to understand their environment through vision and auditory input. Mo- over, HCI systems should learn how to adaptively respond depending on the situation. The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers from the ?eld of computer vision whose work is related to human-computer interaction. The selected articles for this workshop address a wide range of theoretical and - plication issues in human-computer interaction ranging from human-robot - teraction, gesture recognition, and body tracking, to facial features analysis and human-computer interaction systems. This year 74 papers from 18 countries were submitted and 22 were accepted for presentation at the workshop after being reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee. We had therefore a very competitive acceptance rate of less than 30% and as a consequence we had a very-high-quality workshop. Wewouldliketo thankallmembersofthe ProgramCommitteefor their help in ensuring the quality of the papers accepted for publication. We are grateful to Dr. Jian Wang for giving the keynote address. In addition, we wish to thank the organizers of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and our sponsors, University of Amsterdam, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for support in setting up our workshop.

These volumes present together a total of 64 revised full papers and 128 revised posters papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on camera calibration, stereo and pose, texture, face recognition, variational methods, tracking, geometry and calibration, lighting and focus, in the first volume. The papers of the second volume cover topics as detection and applications, statistics and kernels, segmentation, geometry and statistics, signal processing, and video processing.

These volumes present together a total of 64 revised full papers and 128 revised posters papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on camera calibration, stereo and pose, texture, face recognition, variational methods, tracking, geometry and calibration, lighting and focus, in the first volume. The papers of the second volume cover topics as detection and applications, statistics and kernels, segmentation, geometry and statistics, signal processing, and video processing.

Cognitive computing simulates human thought processes with self-learning algorithms that utilize data mining, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. The integration of deep learning improves the performance of Cognitive computing systems in many applications, helping in utilizing heterogeneous data sets and generating meaningful insights.

Whatisactuallytheinformationdirectlyrepresentedinthescale-space?Istarted to wonder about this shortly after Peter Johansen, 15 years ago, showed me his intriguing paper on how uniquely to reconstruct a band-limited 1D signal from its scale-space toppoints. Still, I have not fully understood its implications. Merely recording where structure vanishes under blurring is su?cient to fully reconstruct the details. Of course, technicalities exist, for example, you must also know negative scale toppoints. Nevertheless, I ?nd it surprising that we may trade the metric properties of a signal with the positions of its inherent structure. The result has been generalizedto analytic signals, shown also for the zero crossings of the Laplacean, but has not yet been generalized to 2D. This remains an open problem. In 2003, Peter Giblin, Liverpool University, Luc Florack, Eindhoven Univ- sity of Technology, Jon Sporring, University of Copenhagen, my colleague Ole Fogh Olsen, and several others started the project collaborationDeep Structure and Singularities in Computer Vision under the European Union, IST, Future and Emerging Technologies program, trying to obtain further knowledge about what informationis actuallycarriedby the singularitiesof shapesand gray-scale images. In this project, we probed from several directions the question of how much of the metric information is actually encoded in the structure of shapes and images. We, and many others, have given hints in this direction.

Medical imaging and medical image analysisare rapidly developing. While m- ical imaging has already become a standard of modern medical care, medical image analysis is still mostly performed visually and qualitatively. The ev- increasing volume of acquired data makes it impossible to utilize them in full. Equally important, the visual approaches to medical image analysis are known to su?er from a lack of reproducibility. A signi?cant researche?ort is devoted to developing algorithms for processing the wealth of data available and extracting the relevant information in a computerized and quantitative fashion. Medical imaging and image analysis are interdisciplinary areas combining electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering; computer science; mathem- ics; physics; statistics; biology; medicine; and other ?elds. Medical imaging and computer vision, interestingly enough, have developed and continue developing somewhat independently. Nevertheless, bringing them together promises to b- e't both of these ?elds. We were enthusiastic when the organizers of the 2004 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) allowed us to organize a satellite workshop devoted to medical image analysis.

With the rapid increase in the variety and quantity of biomedical images in recent years, we see a steadily growing number of computer vision technologies applied to biomedical applications. The time is ripe for us to take a closer look at the accomplishments and experiences gained in this research subdomain, and to strategically plan the directions of our future research. The scientific goal of our workshop, "Computer Vision for Biomedical Image Applications: Current Techniques and Future Trends" (CVBIA), is to examine the diverse applications of computer vision to biomedical image applications, considering both current methods and promising new trends. An additional goal is to provide the opportunity for direct interactions between (1) prominent senior researchers and young scientists, including students, postdoctoral associates and junior faculty; (2) local researchers and international leaders in biomedical image analysis; and (3) computer scientists and medical practitioners. Our CVBIA workshop had two novel characteristics: each contributed paper was authored primarily by a young scientist, and the workshop attracted an unusually large number of well-respected invited speakers (and their papers). We had the good fortune of having Dr. Ayache of INRIA, France to talk about "Computational Anatomy and Computational Physiology," Prof. Grimson of MIT to discuss "Analyzing Anatomical Structures: Leveraging Multiple Sources of Knowledge," Dr. Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to present their work on "Computational Neuroanatomy and Brain Connectivity," Prof.

Thisvolumecollectsthepapersacceptedforpresentationatthe7thInternational Conferenceon Advanced Conceptsfor IntelligentVision Systems (ACIVS 2005). TheACIVS conference was established in 1999 in Baden-Baden (Germany) as part of a large multiconference.ACIVS has maintained the tradition of its ?rst edition of having 25-minute oral talks in a single track event, even though the number of participants has been steadily growing every year. The conference currently attracts computer scientists from more than 20 countries, mostly from Europe, Australia and Japan, but also from USA, Asia and the Middle East. ThoughACIVS is a conference on all areas in image processing, one of its major domains is image and video compression. A third of the selected papers dealt with compression, motion estimation, moving object detection and other video applications. This year, topics related to clustering, pattern recognition and biometrics constituted another third of the conference. The last third was more related to the fundamentals of image processing, namely noise reduction, ?ltering, restorationandimagesegmentation.We wouldliketothankthe invited speakers Fernando Pereira, Marc Op de Beeck and Rafael Molina for enhancing the technical program with their presentations

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong - 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the n- ber of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, thereports,thereviews,andtheresponsesweremadeavailabletotheauthorsas well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not re?ected in the ?nal decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. ThepreparationofECCV2004wentsmoothlythankstothee?ortsofthe- ganizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague.

Recent advances in the field of computer vision are leading to novel and radical changes in the way we interact with computers. It will soon be possible to enable a computer linked to a video camera to detect the presence of users, track faces, arms and hands in real time, and analyze expressions and gestures. The implications for interface design are immense and are expected to have major repercussions for all areas where computers are used, from the work place to recreation. This book collects ideas and algorithms from the world's leading scientists, offering a glimpse of the radical changes around the corner that will alter the way we interact with computers in the near future.

The 2004 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, - plications and Technologies (PDCAT 2004) was the ?fth annual conference, and was held at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore on December 8-10, 2004. Since the inaugural PDCAT held in Hong Kong in 2000, the conference has - come a major forum for scientists, engineers, and practitioners throughout the world to present the latest research, results, ideas, developments, techniques, and applications in all areas of parallel and distributed computing. The technical program was comprehensive and featured keynote speeches, te- nical paper presentations, and exhibitions showcased by industry vendors. The technical program committee was overwhelmed with submissions of papers for presentation, from countries worldwide. We received 242 papers and after - viewing them, based on stringent selection criteria, we accepted 173 papers. The papers in the proceedings focus on parallel and distributed computing viewed from the three perspectives of networking and architectures, software systems and technologies, and algorithms and applications. We acknowledge the great contribution from all of our local and international committee members and - perreviewerswhodevotedtheirtimeinthereviewprocessandprovidedvaluable feedback for the authors. PDCAT 2004 could never have been successful without the support and ass- tance of several institutions and many people. We sincerely appreciate the s- port from the National Grid O?ce and IEEE, Singapore for technical co-sponsorship.The?nancialsponsorshipsfromtheindustrialsponsors, Hewlett- Packard Singapore; IBM Singapore; Sun Microsystems; SANDZ Solutions; S- icon Graphics, and Advanced Digital Information Corporation, are gratefully acknowledged