The aim of the conference is to present and discuss new methods, issues and challenges encountered in all parts of the complex process of gradual development and application of digital surface models. This process covers data capture, data generation, storage, model creation, validation, manipulation, utilization and visualization. Each stage requires suitable methods and involves issues that may substantially decrease the value of the model. Furthermore, the conference provides a platform to discuss the requirements, features and research approaches for 3D modeling, continuous field modeling and other geoscience applications. The conference covers the following topics: - LIDAR for elevation data - Radar interferometry for elevation data - Surface model creation - Surface model statistics - Surface model storage (including data formats, standardization, database) - Feature extraction - Analysis of surface models - Surface models for hydrology, meteorology, climatology - Surface models for signal spreading - Surface models for geology (structural, mining) - Surface models for environmental science - Surface models for visibility studies - Surface models for urban geography - Surface models for human geography - Uncertainty of surface models and digital terrain analysis - Surface model visual enhancement and rendering

Highlights key research currently being undertaken within the field of telepresence, providing the most detailed account of the field to date, advancing our understanding of a fundamental property of all media - the illusion of presence; the sense of "being there" inside a virtual environment, with actual or virtual others. This collection has been put together by leading international scholars from America, Europe, and Asia. Together, they describe the state-of-the-art in presence theory, research and technology design for an advanced academic audience. Immersed in Media provides research that can help designers optimize presence for users of advanced media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, collaborative social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence and lead us to better understand human cognition, emotion and behaviour.

This book provides a view of low-rank and sparse computing, especially approximation, recovery, representation, scaling, coding, embedding and learning among unconstrained visual data. The book includes chapters covering multiple emerging topics in this new field. It links multiple popular research fields in Human-Centered Computing, Social Media, Image Classification, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, Big Data, and Human-Computer Interaction. Contains an overview of the low-rank and sparse modeling techniques for visual analysis by examining both theoretical analysis and real-world applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, ISCIS 2016, held in Krakow, Poland, in October 2016. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart algorithms; data classification and processing; stochastic modelling; performance evaluation; queuing systems; wireless networks and security; image processing and computer vision.

This text covers state-of-the-art color image and video enhancement techniques. The book examines the multivariate nature of color image/video data as it pertains to contrast enhancement, color correction (equalization, harmonization, normalization, balancing, constancy, etc.), noise removal and smoothing. This book also discusses color and contrast enhancement in vision sensors and applications of image and video enhancement.

Automatic detection and segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images are prerequisites to subsequent image measurements and disease quantification, and therefore have multiple clinical applications. This book presents an efficient object detection and segmentation framework, called Marginal Space Learning, which runs at a sub-second speed on a current desktop computer, faster than the state-of-the-art. Trained with a sufficient number of data sets, Marginal Space Learning is also robust under imaging artifacts, noise and anatomical variations. The book showcases 35 clinical applications of Marginal Space Learning and its extensions to detecting and segmenting various anatomical structures, such as the heart, liver, lymph nodes and prostate in major medical imaging modalities (CT, MRI, X-Ray and Ultrasound), demonstrating its efficiency and robustness.

Developing a successful game in today's market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of titles are published yearly, all competing for players' time and attention. Game analytics has emerged in the past few years as one of the main resources for ensuring game quality, maximizing success, understanding player behavior and enhancing the quality of the player experience. It has led to a paradigm shift in the development and design strategies of digital games, bringing data-driven intelligence practices into the fray for informing decision making at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Game Analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data is the first book on the topic of game analytics; the process of discovering and communicating patterns in data towards evaluating and driving action, improving performance and solving problems in game development and game research. Written by over 50 international experts from industry and research, it covers a comprehensive range of topics across more than 30 chapters, providing an in-depth discussion of game analytics and its practical applications. Topics covered include monetization strategies, design of telemetry systems, analytics for iterative production, game data mining and big data in game development, spatial analytics, visualization and reporting of analysis, player behavior analysis, quantitative user testing and game user research. This state-of-the-art volume is an essential source of reference for game developers and researchers. Key takeaways include: Thorough introduction to game analytics; covering analytics applied to data on players, processes and performance throughout the game lifecycle. In-depth coverage and advice on setting up analytics systems and developing good practices for integrating analytics in game-development and -management. Contributions by leading researchers and experienced professionals from the industry, including Ubisoft, Sony, EA, Bioware, Square Enix, THQ, Volition, and PlayableGames. Interviews with experienced industry professionals on how they use analytics to create hit games.

This proceedings volume covers the proceedings of ERCICA 2015. ERCICA provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, professional engineers and scientists, educators, and technologists to discuss, debate and promote research and technology in the upcoming areas of Computing, Information, Communication and their Applications. The contents of this book cover emerging research areas in fields of Computing, Information, Communication and Applications. This will prove useful to both researchers and practicing engineers.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industry's need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge.

In the last fifty years the world has been completely transformed through the use of IT. We have now reached a new inflection point. This book presents, for the first time, how in-memory data management is changing the way businesses are run. Today, enterprise data is split into separate databases for performance reasons. Multi-core CPUs, large main memories, cloud computing and powerful mobile devices are serving as the foundation for the transition of enterprises away from this restrictive model. This book provides the technical foundation for processing combined transactional and analytical operations in the same database. In the year since we published the first edition of this book, the performance gains enabled by the use of in-memory technology in enterprise applications has truly marked an inflection point in the market. The new content in this second edition focuses on the development of these in-memory enterprise applications, showing how they leverage the capabilities of in-memory technology. The book is intended for university students, IT-professionals and IT-managers, but also for senior management who wish to create new business processes.

Various fundamental applications in computer vision and machine learning require finding the basis of a certain subspace. Examples of such applications include face detection, motion estimation, and activity recognition. An increasing interest has been recently placed on this area as a result of significant advances in the mathematics of matrix rank optimization. Interestingly, robust subspace estimation can be posed as a low-rank optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently using techniques such as the method of Augmented Lagrange Multiplier. In this book, the authors discuss fundamental formulations and extensions for low-rank optimization-based subspace estimation and representation. By minimizing the rank of the matrix containing observations drawn from images, the authors demonstrate how to solve four fundamental computer vision problems, including video denosing, background subtraction, motion estimation, and activity recognition.

Arising from the fourth Dagstuhl conference entitled Visualization and Processing of Tensors and Higher Order Descriptors for Multi-Valued Data (2011), this book offers a broad and vivid view of current work in this emerging field. Topics covered range from applications of the analysis of tensor fields to research on their mathematical and analytical properties. Part I, Tensor Data Visualization, surveys techniques for visualization of tensors and tensor fields in engineering, discusses the current state of the art and challenges, and examines tensor invariants and glyph design, including an overview of common glyphs. The second Part, Representation and Processing of Higher-order Descriptors, describes a matrix representation of local phase, outlines mathematical morphological operations techniques, extended for use in vector images, and generalizes erosion to the space of diffusion weighted MRI. Part III, Higher Order Tensors and Riemannian-Finsler Geometry, offers powerful mathematical language to model and analyze large and complex diffusion data such as High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) and Diffusion Kurtosis Imaging (DKI). A Part entitled Tensor Signal Processing presents new methods for processing tensor-valued data, including a novel perspective on performing voxel-wise morphometry of diffusion tensor data using kernel-based approach, explores the free-water diffusion model, and reviews proposed approaches for computing fabric tensors, emphasizing trabecular bone research. The last Part, Applications of Tensor Processing, discusses metric and curvature tensors, two of the most studied tensors in geometry processing. Also covered is a technique for diagnostic prediction of first-episode schizophrenia patients based on brain diffusion MRI data. The last chapter presents an interactive system integrating the visual analysis of diffusion MRI tractography with data from electroencephalography.

'We need new maps' is the central claim made in this book. In a world increasingly influenced by human action and interaction, we still rely heavily on mapping techniques that were invented to discover unknown places and explore our physical environment. Although the traditional concept of a map is currently being revived in digital environments, the underlying mapping approaches are not capable of making the complexity of human-environment relationships fully comprehensible. Starting from how people can be put on the map in new ways, this book outlines the development of a novel technique that stretches a map according to quantitative data, such as population. The new maps are called gridded cartograms as the method is based on a grid onto which a density-equalising cartogram technique is applied. The underlying grid ensures the preservation of an accurate geographic reference to the real world. It allows the gridded cartograms to be used as basemaps onto which other information can be mapped. This applies to any geographic information from the human and physical environment. As demonstrated through the examples presented in this book, the new maps are not limited to showing population as a defining element for the transformation, but can show any quantitative geospatial data, such as wealth, rainfall, or even the environmental conditions of the oceans. The new maps also work at various scales, from a global perspective down to the scale of urban environments. The gridded cartogram technique is proposed as a new global and local map projection that is a viable and versatile alternative to other conventional map projections. The maps based on this technique open up a wide range of potential new applications to rediscover the diverse geographies of the world. They have the potential to allow us to gain new perspectives through detailed cartographic depictions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Latin American Robotics Symposium and Third Brazilian Symposium on Robotics, LARS 2015 / SBR 2015, held in Uberlandia, Brazil, in October/November 2015. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The selected papers present a complete and solid reference of the state-of-the-art of intelligent robotics and automation research, covering the following areas: autonomous mobile robots, tele-operated and telepresence robots, human-robot interaction, trajectory control for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, service-oriented robotic systems, semantic mapping, environment mapping, visual odometry, applications of RGB-D sensors, humanoid and biped robots, Robocup soccer robots, robot control, path planning, multiple vehicles and teams of robots.

Presents a strategic perspective and design methodology that guide the process of developing digital products and services that provide 'real experience' to users. Only when the material experienced runs its course to fulfilment is it then regarded as 'real experience' that is distinctively senseful, evaluated as valuable, and harmoniously related to others. Based on the theoretical background of human experience, the book focuses on these three questions: How can we understand the current dominant designs of digital products and services? What are the user experience factors that are critical to provide the real experience? What are the important HCI design elements that can effectively support the various UX factors that are critical to real experience? Design for Experience is intended for people who are interested in the experiences behind the way we use our products and services, for example designers and students interested in interaction, visual graphics and information design or practitioners and entrepreneurs in pursuit of new products or service-based start-ups.

The research book is focused on the recent advances in computer vision methodologies and innovations in practice. The Contributions include: * Human Action Recognition: Contour-Based and Silhouette-based Approaches. * The Application of Machine Learning Techniques to Real Time Audience Analysis System. * Panorama Construction from Multi-view Cameras in Outdoor Scenes. * A New Real-Time Method of Contextual Image Description and Its Application in Robot Navigation and Intelligent Control. * Perception of Audio Visual Information for Mobile Robot Motion Control Systems. * Adaptive Surveillance Algorithms Based on the Situation Analysis. * Enhanced, Synthetic and Combined Vision Technologies for Civil Aviation. * Navigation of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Acoustic and Visual Data Processing. * Efficient Denoising Algorithms for Intelligent Recognition Systems. * Image Segmentation Based on Two-dimensional Markov Chains. The book is directed to the PhD students, professors, researchers and software developers working in the areas of digital video processing and computer vision technologies.

This is the first book to describe how Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robots can interact with real people, be aware of the environment around them, and react to various situations. Researchers from around the world present the main techniques for tracking and analysing humans and their behaviour and contemplate the potential for these virtual humans and robots to replace or stand in for their human counterparts, tackling areas such as awareness and reactions to real world stimuli and using the same modalities as humans do: verbal and body gestures, facial expressions and gaze to aid seamless human-computer interaction (HCI). The research presented in this volume is split into three sections: *User Understanding through Multisensory Perception: deals with the analysis and recognition of a given situation or stimuli, addressing issues of facial recognition, body gestures and sound localization. *Facial and Body Modelling Animation: presents the methods used in modelling and animating faces and bodies to generate realistic motion. *Modelling Human Behaviours: presents the behavioural aspects of virtual humans and social robots when interacting and reacting to real humans and each other. Context Aware Human-Robot and Human-Agent Interaction would be of great use to students, academics and industry specialists in areas like Robotics, HCI, and Computer Graphics.

This book covers up-to-date methods and algorithms for the automated analysis of engineering drawings and digital cartographic maps. The Non-Deterministic Agent System (NDAS) offers a parallel computational approach to such image analysis. The book describes techniques suitable for persistent and explicit knowledge representation for engineering drawings and digital maps. It also highlights more specific techniques, e.g., applying robot navigation and mapping methods to this problem. Also included are more detailed accounts of the use of unsupervised segmentation algorithms to map images. Finally, all these threads are woven together in two related systems: NDAS and AMAM (Automatic Map Analysis Module).

Arrangements of curves constitute fundamental structures that have been intensively studied in computational geometry. Arrangements have numerous applications in a wide range of areas - examples include geographic information systems, robot motion planning, statistics, computer-assisted surgery and molecular biology. Implementing robust algorithms for arrangements is a notoriously difficult task, and the CGAL arrangements package is the first robust, comprehensive, generic and efficient implementation of data structures and algorithms for arrangements of curves. This book is about how to use CGAL two-dimensional arrangements to solve problems. The authors first demonstrate the features of the arrangement package and related packages using small example programs. They then describe applications, i.e., complete standalone programs written on top of CGAL arrangements used to solve meaningful problems - for example, finding the minimum-area triangle defined by a set of points, planning the motion of a polygon translating among polygons in the plane, computing the offset polygon, finding the largest common point sets under approximate congruence, constructing the farthest-point Voronoi diagram, coordinating the motion of two discs moving among obstacles in the plane, and performing Boolean operations on curved polygons. The book contains comprehensive explanations of the solution programs, many illustrations, and detailed notes on further reading, and it is supported by a website that contains downloadable software and exercises. It will be suitable for graduate students and researchers involved in applied research in computational geometry, and for professionals who require worked-out solutions to real-life geometric problems. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the C++ programming-language and with the basics of the generic-programming paradigm.

This book collects new results, concepts and further developments of NMF. The open problems discussed include, e.g. in bioinformatics: NMF and its extensions applied to gene expression, sequence analysis, the functional characterization of genes, clustering and text mining etc. The research results previously scattered in different scientific journals and conference proceedings are methodically collected and presented in a unified form. While readers can read the book chapters sequentially, each chapter is also self-contained. This book can be a good reference work for researchers and engineers interested in NMF, and can also be used as a handbook for students and professionals seeking to gain a better understanding of the latest applications of NMF.

The computational modelling of deformations has been actively studied for the last thirty years. This is mainly due to its large range of applications that include computer animation, medical imaging, shape estimation, face deformation as well as other parts of the human body, and object tracking. In addition, these advances have been supported by the evolution of computer processing capabilities, enabling realism in a more sophisticated way. This book encompasses relevant works of expert researchers in the field of deformation models and their applications. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part presents recent object deformation techniques from the point of view of computer graphics and computer animation. The second part of this book presents six works that study deformations from a computer vision point of view with a common characteristic: deformations are applied in real world applications. The primary audience for this work are researchers from different multidisciplinary fields, such as those related with Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Computer Imaging, Biomedicine, Bioengineering, Mathematics, Physics, Medical Imaging and Medicine.

Tensor signal processing is an emerging field with important applications to computer vision and image processing. This book presents the state of the art in this new branch of signal processing, offering a great deal of research and discussions by leading experts in the area. The wide-ranging volume offers an overview into cutting-edge research into the newest tensor processing techniques and their application to different domains related to computer vision and image processing. This comprehensive text will prove to be an invaluable reference and resource for researchers, practitioners and advanced students working in the area of computer vision and image processing.

This is the first volume of the two-volume set (CCIS 617 and CCIS 618) that contains extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2016, held in Toronto, Canada, in July 2016. The total of 1287 papers and 186 posters presented at the HCII 2016 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 4354 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers 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 papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: design thinking, education and expertise; design and evaluation methods, techniques and tools; cognitive issues in HCI; information presentation and visualization; interaction design; design for older users; usable security and privacy; human modeling and ergonomics.

This is the second volume of the two-volume set (CCIS 617 and CCIS 618) that contains extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2016, held in Toronto, Canada, in July 2016. The total of 1287 papers and 186 posters presented at the HCII 2016 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 4354 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers 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 papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: web, social media and communities; gesture and motion-based interaction; expressions and emotions recognition and psychophysiological monitoring; technologies for learning and creativity; health applications; location-based and navigation applications; smart environments and the Internet of Things; design and evaluation case studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference of the Immersive Learning Network, iLRN 2016, held in Santa Barbara, CA, USA, in June/July 2016. The proceedings contain 9 full papers carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions and the best 5 special track papers. The papers focus on various applications of immersive technologies to learning.