At the frontier of research, this book offers complete coverage of human ear recognition. It explores all aspects of 3D ear recognition: representation, detection, recognition, indexing and performance prediction. It uses large datasets to quantify and compare the performance of various techniques. Features and topics include: Ear detection and recognition in 2D image; 3D object recognition and 3D biometrics; 3D ear recognition; Performance comparison and prediction.

A number of widely used contemporary processors have instruction-set extensions for improved performance in multi-media applications. The aim is to allow operations to proceed on multiple pixels each clock cycle. Such instruction-sets have been incorporated both in specialist DSPchips such as the Texas C62xx (Texas Instruments, 1998) and in general purpose CPU chips like the Intel IA32 (Intel, 2000) or the AMD K6 (Advanced Micro Devices, 1999). These instruction-set extensions are typically based on the Single Instruc tion-stream Multiple Data-stream (SIMD) model in which a single instruction causes the same mathematical operation to be carried out on several operands, or pairs of operands, at the same time. The level or parallelism supported ranges from two floating point operations, at a time on the AMD K6 architecture to 16 byte operations at a time on the Intel P4 architecture. Whereas processor architectures are moving towards greater levels of parallelism, the most widely used programming languages such as C, Java and Delphi are structured around a model of computation in which operations takeplace on a single value at a time. This was appropriate when processors worked this way, but has become an impediment to programmers seeking to make use of the performance offered by multi-media instruction -sets. The introduction of SIMD instruction sets (Peleg et al."

This book covers combinatorial data structures and algorithms, algebraic issues in geometric computing, approximation of curves and surfaces, and computational topology. Each chapter fully details and provides a tutorial introduction to important concepts and results. The focus is on methods which are both well founded mathematically and efficient in practice. Coverage includes references to open source software and discussion of potential applications of the presented techniques.

Thisbook presentsrecentadvancesinthedomainofthe3Dphysiologicalhuman that werepresentedlastDecember at the Workshopon 3D PhysiologicalHuman 2009 that was held in Zermatt, Switzerland. This workshop was funded by the "Third Cycle in Computer Science of Western Switzerland" named CUSO, the European project Focus K3D (ICT-2007-214993), the European Marie Curie project 3D Anatomical Human (MRTN-CT-2006-035763) and the European Network of Excellence InterMedia (NoE-IST-2006-038419). 3D physiological human research is a very active ?eld supported by several scienti?c projects. Many of them are funded by the European Union, such as the 3D Anatomical Human project and those present in the seventh framework programme "Virtual Physiological Human"(FP7-ICT-2007-2). One of the main objectivesof the researchon 3D physiologicalhuman is to create patient-speci?c computer models for personalized healthcare.These models are used to simulate and hence better understand the human physiology and pathology.There is also a synergy in this research in the way medical information is distributed: to have any model available anytime, anywhere on any mobile equipment. A collection of scienti?c articles was proposed to highlight the necessity to exchange and disseminate novel ideas and techniques from a wide range of d- ciplines (computer graphics, biomechanics, knowledge representation, human- machine interface, mobile computing, etc. ) associated with medical imaging, medical simulation, computer-assisted surgery and 3D semantics. The emphasis wason technicalnoveltyalongwith currentandfuture applications for modeling and simulating the anatomical structures and functions of the human body.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

INSTICC organized the third edition of VISIGRAPP that took place in Funchal- Madeira, Portugal in January 2008 after successful previous editions. This book - cludes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2008, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and Computer Graphics Theory and - plications (GRAPP). The conference was intended to stimulate the exchange of ideas on the topics of c- puter vision and computer graphics. We received a high number of paper submissions: 374 in total for both conferences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 20 were selected for this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from the ones that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee Members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2008 also featured the comments of keynote speakers, in alphabetical order, Adrian Hilton (University of Surrey, UK), Genevieve Lucet (Computer S- vices for Research at the UNAM, Mexico), Peter Sturm (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France) and Sharathchandra Pankanti (IBM - Exploratory Computer Vision Group, USA), who are internationally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an - portant contribution to the overall quality of the conference.

The 14th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP 2009, C- gresoIberoAmericanodeReconocimientodePatrones)formedthelatestofanow longseriesofsuccessfulmeetingsarrangedbytherapidlygrowingIberoamerican pattern recognition community. The conference was held in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and organized by the Mexican Association for Computer Vision, Neural Computing and Robotics (MACVNR). It was sponsodred by MACVNR and ?ve other Iberoamerican PR societies. CIARP 2009 was like the previous conferences in the series supported by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). CIARP 2009 attracted participants from all over the world presenting sta- of-the-artresearchon mathematical methods and computing techniques for p- tern recognition, computer vision, image and signal analysis, robot vision, and speech recognition, as well as on a wide range of their applications. This time the conference attracted participants from 23 countries,9 in Ibe- america, and 14 from other parts of the world. The total number of submitted papers was 187, and after a serious review process 108 papers were accepted, all of them with a scienti?c quality above overall mean rating. Sixty-four were selected as oral presentations and 44 as posters. Since 2008 the conference is almost single track, and therefore there was no real grading in quality between oral and poster papers. As an acknowledgment that CIARP has established itself as a high-quality conference, its proceedings appear in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Moreover, its visibility is further enhanced by a selection of a set of papers that will be published in a special issue of the journal Pattern Recognition Letters.

The Mexican International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (MICAI), a yearly international conference organized by the Mexican Society for Arti?cial Intelligence (SMIA), is a major international AI forum and the main event in the academic life of the country's growing AI community. The proceedings of the previous MICAI events were published by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence (LNAI) series, vol. 1793,2313,2972,3787,4293,4827, and 5317. Since its foundation the conference has been growing in popularity and improving quality. This volume contains the papers presented at the oral sessions of the 8th Mexican International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence, MICAI 2009, held November 9-13, 2009, in Guanajuato, Mexico. The conference received for ev- uation 215 submissions by 646 authors from 21 countries. This volume contains revised versionsof 63 articles, which after thorough and careful revision were- lected by the international Program Committee. Thus the acceptance rate was 29.3% This book is structured into 18 sections, 17 of which correspond to a c- ference track and are representative of the main current areas of interest for the AI community; the remaining section comprises invited papers. The conference featured excellent keynote lectures by leading AI experts: Patricia Melin, Instituto Tecnologico de Tijuana, Mexico Dieter Hutter, DFKI GmbH, Germany Josef Kittler, Surrey University, UK Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIA-CSIC, Spain Jose Luis Marroquin, CIMAT, Mexico In addition to the oral technical sessions and keynote lectures, the conf- ence program included tutorials, workshops, and a poster session, which were published in separate proceedings volumes."

The concept of CAST as Computer Aided Systems Theory was introduced by F. Pichler in the late 1980s to refer to computer theoretical and practical developments as tools for solving problems in system science. It was thought of as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) required to complete the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. Franz Pichler, of the University of Linz, organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas, February 1989) under the name EUROCAST'89. This proved to be a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years, alternating between Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and a continental European location. From 2001 the conference has been held exclusively in Las Palmas. Thus, successive EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), In- bruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001), Las Palmas (2003) Las Palmas (2005) and Las Palmas (2007), in addition to an extra-European CAST c- ference in Ottawa in 1994.

This book contains a selection of higher quality and reviewed papers of the 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2009, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in October 2009.

The 55 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 163 submissions.

The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial intelligence in transportation and urban mobility (AITUM), artificial life and evolutionary algorithms (ALEA), computational methods in bioinformatics and systems biology (CMBSB), computational logic with applications (COLA), emotional and affective computing (EAC), general artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent robotics (IROBOT), knowledge discovery and business intelligence (KDBI), muli-agent systems (MASTA) social simulation and modelling (SSM), text mining and application (TEMA) as well as web and network intelligence (WNI).

Thebookpresentsa cross-sectionofstate-of-the-artresearchonmultimodalc- pora, a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions ofpapersacceptedtotheInternationalWorkshoponMultimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction th with the 6 International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. This international workshop series started in 2000 and has since then grown into a regular satellite event of the bi-annual LREC conference, attracting researchers from ?elds as diverse as psychology, arti?cial intelligence, robotics, signal processing, computational linguisticsandhuman-computerinteraction. Tocomplement theselected papers from the 2008 workshop, we invited well-known researchers from corpus coll- tioninitiativestocontributetothisvolume. Wewereabletoobtainseveninvited research articles, including contributions from major international multimodal corpus projects like AMI and SmartWeb, which complement the six selected workshop contributions. All papers underwent a special review process for this volume, resulting in signi?cant revisions and extensions based on the experts' advice. While we were pleased that the 2006 edition of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, published in 2007, we felt that this was the time for another major publication, given not onlytherapidprogressandincreasedinterestin this researchareabut especially in order to acknowledge the di?culty of disseminating results across discipline borders. The Springer LNAI series is the perfect platform for doing so. We also created the website www. multimodal-corpora.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion, held as the 5th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society, USAB 2009, in Linz, Austria, in November 2009.

The 12 revised full papers and 26 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on gender and cognitive performance, usefulness, usability, accessibility, emotion, confidence and elderly, usability testing, evaluation, measurement, education, learning and e-inclusion, design for adaptive content processing, grounded theory, activity theory and situated action, smart home, health and ambient assistent living, user centred design and usability practice, interaction, assistive technologies and virtual environments, communication, interfaces and haptic technology as well as new technologies and challenges for people with disabilities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IAPR International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI 2009, held in Montreal, Canada, in September/October 2009.

The 42 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete shape, representation, recognition and analysis; discrete and combinatorial tools for image segmentation and analysis; discrete and combinatorial Topology; models for discrete geometry; geometric transforms; and discrete tomography.

This book constitutes the research papers presented at the Joint 2101 & 2102 International Conference on Biometric ID Management and Multimodal Communication.

BioID_MultiComm'09 is a joint International Conference organized cooperatively by COST Actions 2101 and 2102. COST 2101 Action is focused on "Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart Cards (BIDS)," while COST 2102 Action is entitled "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Non-verbal Communication."

The aim of COST 2101 is to investigate novel technologies for unsupervised multimodal biometric authentication systems using a new generation of biometrics-enabled identity documents and smart cards.

COST 2102 is devoted to develop an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of recognizing human emotional states.

The First Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2009) was held at Nanjing, China during November 2-4, 2009.This was the ?rst edition of a series of annual conferences which aim to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related ?elds to share their new ideas and research ?ndings. This year we received 113 submissions from 18 countries and regions in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. The submissions went through a r- orous double-blind reviewing process. Most submissions received four reviews, a few submissions received ?ve reviews, while only several submissions received three reviews. Each submission was handled by an Area Chair who coordinated discussions among reviewers and made recommendation on the submission. The Program Committee Chairs examined the reviews and meta-reviews to further guarantee the reliability and integrity of the reviewing process. Twenty-nine - pers were selected after this process. To ensure that important revisions required by reviewers were incorporated into the ?nal accepted papers, and to allow submissions which would have - tential after a careful revision, this year we launched a "revision double-check" process. In short, the above-mentioned 29 papers were conditionally accepted, and the authors were requested to incorporate the "important-and-must"re- sionssummarizedbyareachairsbasedonreviewers'comments.Therevised?nal version and the revision list of each conditionally accepted paper was examined by the Area Chair and Program Committee Chairs. Papers that failed to pass the examination were ?nally rejected.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2009, held in Bordeaux, France in September/October 2009.

The 43 revised full papers and 25 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on technovision, fundamental mathematical techniques, image processing, coding and filtering, image and video analysis, computer vision, tracking, color, multispectral and special-purpose imaging, medical imaging, and biometrics.

Overthelastdecades, energyminimizationmethods havebecomeanestablished paradigm to resolve a variety of challenges in the ?elds of computer vision and pattern recognition. While traditional approaches to computer vision were often based on a heuristic sequence of processing steps and merely allowed very l- ited theoretical understanding of the respective methods, most state-of-the-art methods are nowadays based on the concept of computing solutions to a given problem by minimizing respective energies. This volume contains the papers presented at the 7th International Conf- ence on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Rec- nition (EMMCVPR 2009), held at the University of Bonn, Germany, August 24-28, 2009. These papers demonstrate that energy minimization methods have become a mature ?eld of research spanning a broad range of areas from discrete graph theoretic approaches and Markov random ?elds to variational methods and partial di?erential equations. Application areas include image segmentation and tracking, shape optimization and registration, inpainting and image deno- ing, color and texture modeling, statistics and learning. Overall, we received 75 high-quality double-blind submissions. Based on the reviewer recommendations, 36paperswereselectedforpublication,18asoraland18asposterpresentations. Both oral and poster papers were attributed the same number of pages in the conference proceedings. Furthermore, we were delighted that three leading experts from the ?elds of computer vision and energy minimization, namely, Richard Hartley (C- berra, Australia), Joachim Weickert (Saarbruc ] ken, Germany) and Guillermo Sapiro(Minneapolis, USA)agreedtofurtherenrichtheconferencewithinspiring keynote lectures.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

The International Gesture Workshops (GW) are interdisciplinary events for those researching gesture-based communication across the disciplines. The focus of these events is a shared interest in understanding gestures and sign language in their many facets, and using them for advancing human-machine interaction. Since 1996, International Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings published by Springer. The International Gesture Workshop GW 2009 was hosted by Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF - Zentrum fur interdisziplinare Forschung) during February 25-27, 2009. Like its predecessors, GW 2009 aimed to provide a platform for participants to share, discuss, and criticize recent and novel research with a multidisciplinary audience. More than 70 computer scientists, linguistics, psychologists, neuroscientists as well as dance and music scientists from 16 countries met to present and exchange their newest results under the umbrella theme "Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction. " Consistent with the steady growth of research activity in this area, a large number of high-quality submissions were received, which made GW 2009 an exciting and important event for anyone interested in gesture-related technological research relevant to human-computer interaction. In line with the practice of previous gesture workshops, presenters were invited to submit theirs papers for publication in a subsequent peer-reviewed publication of high quality. The present book is the outcome of this effort. Representing the research work from eight countries, it contains a selection of 28 thoroughly reviewed articles.

Similarity-based learning methods have a great potential as an intuitive and ?exible toolbox for mining, visualization,and inspection of largedata sets. They combine simple and human-understandable principles, such as distance-based classi?cation, prototypes, or Hebbian learning, with a large variety of di?erent, problem-adapted design choices, such as a data-optimum topology, similarity measure, or learning mode. In medicine, biology, and medical bioinformatics, more and more data arise from clinical measurements such as EEG or fMRI studies for monitoring brain activity, mass spectrometry data for the detection of proteins, peptides and composites, or microarray pro?les for the analysis of gene expressions. Typically, data are high-dimensional, noisy, and very hard to inspect using classic (e. g. , symbolic or linear) methods. At the same time, new technologies ranging from the possibility of a very high resolution of spectra to high-throughput screening for microarray data are rapidly developing and carry thepromiseofane?cient,cheap,andautomaticgatheringoftonsofhigh-quality data with large information potential. Thus, there is a need for appropriate - chine learning methods which help to automatically extract and interpret the relevant parts of this information and which, eventually, help to enable und- standingofbiologicalsystems,reliablediagnosisoffaults,andtherapyofdiseases such as cancer based on this information. Moreover, these application scenarios pose fundamental and qualitatively new challenges to the learning systems - cause of the speci?cs of the data and learning tasks. Since these characteristics are particularly pronounced within the medical domain, but not limited to it and of principled interest, this research topic opens the way toward important new directions of algorithmic design and accompanying theory.

This book contains 71 original, scienti?c articles that address state-of-the-art researchrelatedto scale space and variationalmethods for image processing and computer vision. Topics covered in the book range from mathematical analysis of both established and new models, fast numerical methods, image analysis, segmentation, registration, surface and shape construction and processing, to real applications in medical imaging and computer vision. The ideas of scale spaceandvariationalmethodsrelatedtopartialdi?erentialequationsarecentral concepts. The papers re?ect the newest developments in these ?elds and also point to the latest literature. All the papers were submitted to the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision, which took place in Voss, Norway, during June 1-5, 2009. The papers underwent a peer review process similar to that of high-level journals in the ?eld. We thank the authors, the Scienti?c Committee, the Program Committee and the reviewers for their hard work and helpful collaboration. Their contribution has been crucial for the e?cient processing of this book, and for the success of the conference.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 7th IAPR-TC-15 Workshop onGraph-BasedRepresentationsinPatternRecognition- GbR2009.Thewo- shop was held in Venice, Italy between May 26-28, 2009. The previous wo- shops in the series were held in Lyon, France (1997), Haindorf, Austria (1999), Ischia, Italy (2001), York, UK (2003), Poitiers, France (2005), and Alicante, Spain (2007). The Technical Committee (TC15, http: //www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/iapr-tc15/) of the IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) was founded in order to federate and to encourage research work at the intersection of pattern recognition and graph theory. Among its activities, the TC15 encourages the organization of special graph sessions in many computer vision conferences and organizes the biennial GbR Workshop. The scienti?c focus of these workshops coversresearchin pattern recognition and image analysis within the graph theory framework. This workshop series traditionally provide a forum for presenting and discussing research results and applications in the intersection of pattern recognition, image analysis and graph theory

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2009, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal in June 2009.

The 33 revised full papers and 29 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer vision, image analysis and processing, as well as pattern recognition.

This volume collects the papers accepted for presentation atMIRAGE 2009. TheMIRAGE conference is continuing to receive international recognition, with this year's presentations coming from 25 countries despite the large wor- wide ?nancial crisis. This time Asia submitted far fewer papers than previously and fewer than Europe. France provedto be the most active scienti?cally with a total of 16 submitted papers. Germany came second (10 submitted papers) and China third (8 papers). We received a total of 83 submissions and accepted 41 as oral presentations, over the three-day event. All papers were reviewed by three to four members of theProgramCommittee.The?nalselectionwasmadebytheConferenceChairs. At this point, we wish to thank the Program Committee and additional referees for their timely and high-quality reviews. We also thank the invited speakers Luc Van Gool, Frank Multon and Raquel Urtasun for kindly accepting to present very interesting talks. mirage 2009 was organizedbyinria Rocquencourt and took place atinria, Rocquencourt, close to Versailles. We believe that the conference proved to be a stimulating experience for all. March 2009 A. Gagalowicz W. Philips Organization Mirage 2009 was organized byinria and Ghent University.

The application of Computational Intelligence in emerging research areas such as Granular Computing, Mechatronics, and Bioinformatics shows its usefulness often emphasized by Prof Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy logic and many others. This book contains recent advances in Computational Intelligence methods for modeling, optimization and prediction and covers a large number of applications. The book presents new Computational Intelligence theory and methods for modeling and prediction. The range of the various applications is captured with 5 chapters in image processing, 2 chapters in audio processing, 3 chapters in commerce and finance, 2 chapters in communication networks and 6 chapters containing other applications.