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.

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.

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.

Human computer interaction (HCI) plays a vital role in bridging the 'Digital Divide', bringing people closer to consumer electronics control in the 'lounge'. Keyboards and mouse or remotes do alienate old and new generations alike from control interfaces. Hand Gesture Recognition systems bring hope of connecting people with machines in a natural way. This will lead to consumers being able to use their hands naturally to communicate with any electronic equipment in their 'lounge.' This monograph will include the state of the art hand gesture recognition approaches and how they evolved from their inception. The author would also detail his research in this area for the past 8 years and how the future might turn out to be using HCI. This monograph will serve as a valuable guide for researchers (who would endeavour into) in the world of HCI.

Outlier-contaminated data is a fact of life in computer vision. For computer vision applications to perform reliably and accurately in practical settings, the processing of the input data must be conducted in a robust manner. In this context, the maximum consensus robust criterion plays a critical role by allowing the quantity of interest to be estimated from noisy and outlier-prone visual measurements. The maximum consensus problem refers to the problem of optimizing the quantity of interest according to the maximum consensus criterion. This book provides an overview of the algorithms for performing this optimization. The emphasis is on the basic operation or "inner workings" of the algorithms, and on their mathematical characteristics in terms of optimality and efficiency. The applicability of the techniques to common computer vision tasks is also highlighted. By collecting existing techniques in a single article, this book aims to trigger further developments in this theoretically interesting and practically important area.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Chinese Conference on Image and Graphics Technologies and Applications, IGTA 2016, held in Beijing, China in July 2016. The 27 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. They provide a forum for sharing progresses in the areas of image processing technology; image analysis and understanding; computer vision and pattern recognition; big data mining, computer graphics and VR; as well as image technology applications.

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.

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.

Taking into account aspects of semantic world models and graph databases, Nico Hempe presents concepts for a new class of modern Multi-Domain VR Simulation Systems based on the principles of the research field of eRobotics. Nico Hempe not only shows how to overcome structural differences between rendering and simulation frameworks to allow attractive and intuitive representations of the generated results, he also demonstrates ways to enable rendering-supported simulations. The outcome is an intuitive multi-purpose development tool for multiple applications, ranging from industrial domains over environmental scenarios up to space robotics.

The 2-volume set LNCS 9768 and 9769 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics, AVR 2016, held in Lecce, Italy, in June 2016. The 40 full papers and 29 short papers presented werde carefully reviewed and selected from 131 submissions. The SALENTO AVR 2016 conference intended to bring together researchers, scientists, and practitioners to discuss key issues, approaches, ideas, open problems, innovative applications and trends on virtual and augmented reality, 3D visualization and computer graphics in the areas of medicine, cultural heritage, arts, education, entertainment, industrial andmilitary sectors.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Iberoamerican Conference on Applications and Usability of Interactive TV, jAUTI 2015, and the 6th Congress on Interactive Digital TV, CTVDI 2015, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in October 2015. The 10 revised full papers and two short papers presented together with an invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected for this volume from 30 accepted submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Second Screen Applications Immersive TV; Video Consumption Development Tools; IDTV Interoperability; IDTV User Experience; Audiovisual Accessibility.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference entitled Beyond Databases, Architectures and Structures, BDAS 2016, held in Ustron, Poland, in May/June 2016. It consists of 57 carefully reviewed papers selected from 152 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections, namely artificial intelligence, data mining and knowledge discovery; architectures, structures and algorithms for efficient data processing; data warehousing and OLAP; natural language processing, ontologies and semantic Web; bioinformatics and biomedical data analysis; data processing tools; novel applications of database systems.

New data acquisition techniques are emerging and are providing fast and efficient means for multidimensional spatial data collection. Airborne LIDAR surveys, SAR satellites, stereo-photogrammetry and mobile mapping systems are increasingly used for the digital reconstruction of the environment. All these systems provide extremely high volumes of raw data, often enriched with other sensor data (e.g., beam intensity). Improving methods to process and visually analyze this massive amount of geospatial and user-generated data is crucial to increase the efficiency of organizations and to better manage societal challenges. Within this context, this book proposes an up-to-date view of computational methods and tools for spatio-temporal data fusion, multivariate surface generation, and feature extraction, along with their main applications for surface approximation and rainfall analysis. The book is intended to attract interest from different fields, such as computer vision, computer graphics, geomatics, and remote sensing, working on the common goal of processing 3D data. To this end, it presents and compares methods that process and analyze the massive amount of geospatial data in order to support better management of societal challenges through more timely and better decision making, independent of a specific data modeling paradigm (e.g., 2D vector data, regular grids or 3D point clouds). We also show how current research is developing from the traditional layered approach, adopted by most GIS softwares, to intelligent methods for integrating existing data sets that might contain important information on a geographical area and environmental phenomenon. These services combine traditional map-oriented visualization with fully 3D visual decision support methods and exploit semantics-oriented information (e.g., a-priori knowledge, annotations, segmentations) when processing, merging, and integrating big pre-existing data sets.

Modeling data from visual and linguistic modalities together creates opportunities for better understanding of both, and supports many useful applications. Examples of dual visual-linguistic data includes images with keywords, video with narrative, and figures in documents. We consider two key task-driven themes: translating from one modality to another (e.g., inferring annotations for images) and understanding the data using all modalities, where one modality can help disambiguate information in another. The multiple modalities can either be essentially semantically redundant (e.g., keywords provided by a person looking at the image), or largely complementary (e.g., meta data such as the camera used). Redundancy and complementarity are two endpoints of a scale, and we observe that good performance on translation requires some redundancy, and that joint inference is most useful where some information is complementary. Computational methods discussed are broadly organized into ones for simple keywords, ones going beyond keywords toward natural language, and ones considering sequential aspects of natural language. Methods for keywords are further organized based on localization of semantics, going from words about the scene taken as whole, to words that apply to specific parts of the scene, to relationships between parts. Methods going beyond keywords are organized by the linguistic roles that are learned, exploited, or generated. These include proper nouns, adjectives, spatial and comparative prepositions, and verbs. More recent developments in dealing with sequential structure include automated captioning of scenes and video, alignment of video and text, and automated answering of questions about scenes depicted in images.

Because circular objects are projected to ellipses in images, ellipse fitting is a first step for 3-D analysis of circular objects in computer vision applications. For this reason, the study of ellipse fitting began as soon as computers came into use for image analysis in the 1970s, but it is only recently that optimal computation techniques based on the statistical properties of noise were established. These include renormalization (1993), which was then improved as FNS (2000) and HEIV (2000). Later, further improvements, called hyperaccurate correction (2006), HyperLS (2009), and hyper-renormalization (2012), were presented. Today, these are regarded as the most accurate fitting methods among all known techniques. This book describes these algorithms as well implementation details and applications to 3-D scene analysis. We also present general mathematical theories of statistical optimization underlying all ellipse fitting algorithms, including rigorous covariance and bias analyses and the theoretical accuracy limit. The results can be directly applied to other computer vision tasks including computing fundamental matrices and homographies between images. This book can serve not simply as a reference of ellipse fitting algorithms for researchers, but also as learning material for beginners who want to start computer vision research. The sample program codes are downloadable from the website: https://sites.google.com/a/morganclaypool.com/ellipse-fitting-for-computer-vision-implementation-and-applications.

In his master thesis, Sven Painer develops, implements, and evaluates a method to reconstruct the liver surface from monocular mini-laparoscopic sequences. The principal focus of his research is to create a basis for helping clinicians to write reports with quantitative descriptions of the liver surface. A Structure from Motion approach is performed to do a sparse reconstruction of the liver surface and subsequently this information is used in a variation based dense 3D reconstruction. The algorithms are formulated in a causal way, enabling the implementation to be run in real-time on an adequate hardware platform. The results show a significant performance increase and pave the way to give clinicians a feedback during video capturing to improve the quality of the reconstruction in the near future.

This book contains the reviewed, accepted contributions of the First International Symposium on Intelligent Computing Systems (ISICS) that was held in Merida (Mexico) from 16-18 March 2016. We received 25 submissions from 13 countries. Each submission had been evaluated by at least three members of the Program Committee and external reviewers. Based on these reviews, 12 papers were selected for long oral presentation. In addition to the contributed papers, four keynote speaker presentations were included in the conference program.

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of interactive multi-agent simulations. This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques, starting from classical planning and computational geometry techniques and then gradually moving toward more advanced topics with focus on recent developments from the work of the authors. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.