During the past few years, we have been witnessing the rapid growth of the ap plications of Interactive Digital Video, Multimedia Computing, Desktop Video Teleconferencing, Virtual Reality, and High Definition Television (HDTV). An other information revolution which is tied to Cyberspace is almost within reach. The information, data, text, graphics, video, sound, etc. , in the form of multi media, can be requested, accessed, distributed, and transmitted to potentially every household. This is changing and will continue to change the way of people doing business, functioning in the society, and entertaining. In the foreseeable future, many personalized, portable information terminals, which can be car ried while traveling, will provide the link to central computer network to allow information exchange including videos from a node to node, from a center to a node, or nodes. Facing this opportunity, the question is what are the major significant technical challenges that people have to solve to push the-state-of-the-art for the realiza tion of the above mentioned technology advancement? From our professional judgement We feel that one of the major technical challenges is in Video Data Compression. Video communications in the form of desktop teleconferencing, videophone, network video delivery on demand, even games, are going to be major media traveling in the information super highway, hopping from one node in the Cyberspace to the other.

The key contribution of the approach to x-ray mammographic image analysis developed in this monograph is a representation of the non-fatty compressed breast tissue that we show can be derived from a single mammogram. The importance of the representation, called hint, is that it removes all those changes in the image that are due only to the particular imaging conditions (for example, the film speed or exposure time), leaving just the non-fatty interesting' tissue. Normalising images in this way enables them to be enhanced and matched, and regions in them to be classified more reliably, because unnecessary, distracting variations have been eliminated. Part I of the monograph develops a model-based approach to x-ray mammography, Part II shows how it can be put to work successfully on a range of clinically-important tasks, while Part III develops a model and exploits it for contrast-enhanced MRI mammography. The final chapter points the way forward in a number of promising areas of research. Audience: This book has been written for a wide readership, including medical image analysts, medical physicists, radiologists, breast surgeons, and research students. The mathematics and algorithms have been relegated to boxes so that the book can be read and understood even if the mathematical detail is skipped. Large parts of the monograph will be of interest to clinicians generally and to patients.

Vision-based mobile robot guidance has proved difficult for classical machine vision methods because of the diversity and real-time constraints inherent in the task. This book describes a connectionist system called ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) that overcomes these difficulties. ALVINN learns to guide mobile robots using the back-propagation training algorithm. Because of its ability to learn from example, ALVINN can adapt to new situations and therefore cope with the diversity of the autonomous navigation task. But real world problems like vision-based mobile robot guidance present a different set of challenges for the connectionist paradigm. Among them are: * how to develop a general representation from a limited amount of real training data; * how to understand the internal representations developed by artificial neural networks; * how to estimate the reliability of individual networks; * how to combine multiple networks trained for different situations into a single system; * how to combine connectionist perception with symbolic reasoning.Neural Network Perception for Mobile Robot Guidance presents novel solutions to each of these problems. Using these techniques, the ALVINN system can learn to control an autonomous van in under 5 minutes by watching a person drive. Once trained, individual ALVINN networks can drive in a variety of circumstances, including single-lane paved and unpaved roads, and multi-lane lined and unlined roads, at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. The techniques also are shown to generalize to the task of controlling the precise foot placement of a walking robot.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2011, held in Kutaisi, Georgia, in September 2011. The book consists of summaries of 3 tutorials presented at the symposium together with 13 full papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from the submissions. The papers are organized in two sections, one on Language and one on Logic and Computation. The range of topics covered in the Language section includes natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, frames in natural language semantics, linguistic typology, and discourse phenomena. The papers in the Logic and Computation section cover such topics as constructive, modal, algebraic, and philosophical logic, as well as logics for computer science applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 2012 ICSOC Workshops consisting of 6 scientific satellite events, organized in 3 main tracks including workshop track (ASC, DISA. PAASC, SCEB, SeMaPS and WESOA 2012), PhD symposium track, demonstration track; held in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC), in Shanghai, China, November 2012. The 53 revised papers presents a wide range of topics that fall into the general area of service computing such as business process management, distributed systems, computer networks, wireless and mobile computing, grid computing, networking, service science, management science, and software engineering.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in February 2012. The 26 revised full papers presented together with one invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 522 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and are organized in four general topical sections on biomedical electronics and devices; bioinformatics models, methods and algorithms; bio-inspired systems and signal processing; health informatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Chinese Conference on Image and Graphics Technologies and Applications, IGTA 2013, held in Beijing, China, in April 2013. The 40 papers and posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers address issues such as the generation of new ideas, new approaches, new techniques, new applications and new evaluation in the field of image processing and graphics.

1. Introduction . 1 2. Areas and Angles . . 6 3. Tessellations and Symmetry 14 4. The Postulate of Closest Approach 28 5. The Coexistence of Rotocenters 36 6. A Diophantine Equation and its Solutions 46 7. Enantiomorphy. . . . . . . . 57 8. Symmetry Elements in the Plane 77 9. Pentagonal Tessellations . 89 10. Hexagonal Tessellations 101 11. Dirichlet Domain 106 12. Points and Regions 116 13. A Look at Infinity . 122 14. An Irrational Number 128 15. The Notation of Calculus 137 16. Integrals and Logarithms 142 17. Growth Functions . . . 149 18. Sigmoids and the Seventh-year Trifurcation, a Metaphor 159 19. Dynamic Symmetry and Fibonacci Numbers 167 20. The Golden Triangle 179 21. Quasi Symmetry 193 Appendix I: Exercise in Glide Symmetry . 205 Appendix II: Construction of Logarithmic Spiral . 207 Bibliography . 210 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Concepts and Images is the result of twenty years of teaching at Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, a department devoted to turning out students articulate in images much as a language department teaches reading and expressing one self in words. It is a response to our students' requests for a "handout" and to l our colleagues' inquiries about the courses: Visual and Environmental Studies 175 (Introduction to Design Science), YES 176 (Synergetics, the Structure of Ordered Space), Studio Arts 125a (Design Science Workshop, Two-Dimension al), Studio Arts 125b (Design Science Workshop, Three-Dimensional),2 as well as my freshman seminars on Structure in Science and Art."

Video Object Extraction and Representation: Theory and Applications is an essential reference for electrical engineers working in video; computer scientists researching or building multimedia databases; video system designers; students of video processing; video technicians; and designers working in the graphic arts. In the coming years, the explosion of computer technology will enable a new form of digital media. Along with broadband Internet access and MPEG standards, this new media requires a computational infrastructure to allow users to grab and manipulate content. The book reviews relevant technologies and standards for content-based processing and their interrelations. Within this overview, the book focuses upon two problems at the heart of the algorithmic/computational infrastructure: video object extraction, or how to automatically package raw visual information by content; and video object representation, or how to automatically index and catalogue extracted content for browsing and retrieval.The book analyzes the designs of two novel, working systems for content-based extraction and representation in the support of MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 video standards, respectively. Features of the book include: * Overview of MPEG standards; * A working system for automatic video object segmentation; * A working system for video object query by shape; * Novel technology for a wide range of recognition problems; * Overview of neural network and vision technologies Video Object Extraction and Representation: Theory and Applications will be of interest to research scientists and practitioners working in fields related to the topic. It may also be used as an advanced-level graduate text.

The book deals with the development of a methodology to estimate the motion field between two frames for video coding applications. This book proposes an exhaustive study of the motion estimation process in the framework of a general video coder. The conceptual explanations are discussed in a simple language and with the use of suitable figures. The book will serve as a guide for new researchers working in the field of motion estimation techniques.

Although synthetic environments were traditionally used in military settings for mission rehearsal and simulations, their use is rapidly spreading to a variety of applications in the commercial, research and industrial sectors, such as flight training for commercial aircraft, city planning, car safety research in real-time traffic simulations, and video games. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction contains seven invited chapters from leading experts in the field, bringing together a coherent body of recent knowledge relating 3D geospatial data collection, design issues, and techniques used in synthetic environments design, implementation and interoperability. In particular, this book describes new techniques for the generation of Synthetic Environments with increased resolution and rich attribution, both essential for accurate modeling and simulation. This book also deals with interoperability of models and simulations, which is necessary for facilitating the reuse of modeling and simulation components. 3D Synthetic Environment Reconstruction is an excellent reference for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Matrix transforms are ubiquitous within the world of computer graphics, where they have become an invaluable tool in a programmer's toolkit for solving everything from 2D image scaling to 3D rotation about an arbitrary axis. Virtually every software system and hardware graphics processor uses matrices to undertake operations such as scaling, translation, reflection and rotation. Nevertheless, for some newcomers to the world of computer games and animation, matrix notation can appear obscure and challenging.

Matrices and determinants were originally used to solve groups of simultaneous linear equations, and were subsequently embraced by the computer graphics community to describe the geometric operations for manipulating two- and three-dimensional structures. Consequently, to place matrix notation within an historical context, the author provides readers with some useful background to their development, alongside determinants.

Although it is assumed that the reader is familiar with everyday algebra and the solution of simultaneous linear equations, "Matrix Transforms for Computer Games and Animation" does not expect any prior knowledge of matrix notation. It includes chapters on matrix notation, determinants, matrices, 2D transforms, 3D transforms and quaternions, and includes many worked examples to illustrate their practical use.

Super-Resolution Imaging serves as an essential reference for both academicians and practicing engineers. It can be used both as a text for advanced courses in imaging and as a desk reference for those working in multimedia, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics. The first book to cover the new research area of super-resolution imaging, this text includes work on the following groundbreaking topics: * Image zooming based on wavelets and generalized interpolation; * Super-resolution from sub-pixel shifts; * Use of blur as a cue; * Use of warping in super-resolution; * Resolution enhancement using multiple apertures; * Super-resolution from motion data; * Super-resolution from compressed video; * Limits in super-resolution imaging. Written by the leading experts in the field, Super-Resolution Imaging presents a comprehensive analysis of current technology, along with new research findings and directions for future work.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Motion in Games, held in Edinburgh, UK, in November 2011. The 30 revised full papers presented together with 8 revised poster papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on character animation, motion synthesis, physically-based character motion, behavior animation, animation systems, crowd simulation, as well as path planning and navigation.

The following chapters of this book presents key issues concerning the neurophysiological aspects of executing cognitive thought processes and the basics of cognitive informatics and new proposals of UBIAS systems dedicated to the meaning-based analysis of selected types of medical images. In particular, to structure the considerations of pattern classification methods, Chapter 2 discusses traditional image recognition techniques and algorithms from the simplest methods based on metric spaces up to methods that use the paradigms of computer image understanding. Chapter 3 deals with the cognitive aspects of brain function. Information from this chapter allows the authors, in a latter part of this book, to show functional analogies between the operation of biological systems and computer implementations. Chapter 4 provides a short compendium of knowledge about the new branch of informatics which formally describes thought processes, namely cognitive informatics. The introduction to subjects of cognitive processes analysed by cognitive informatics will then allow us to introduce new classes of computer systems executing cognitive resonance processes. The following Chapter 5 defines a new class of information systems using cognitive resonance processes. This chapter reviews several proposals of various classes of cognitive categorisation systems put forward by the authors. Chapter 6 contains a broader discussion of the UBIAS system class which the authors proposed for the meaning-based analysis of medical images. Then, Chapter 7 discusses in detail two examples of UBIAS systems built for the semantic classification of foot bone X-rays and images of long bone injuries in extremities. Chapter 8, the last, compiles and summarises information on creating cognitive vision systems designed for the semantic classification of patterns.

The authors present this book to Readers in the hope that it will stir their fascination with the scientific aspects of creating new generation computer systems which imitate thought processes and can determine the meaning of complex image patterns.

A guide on the use of SVMs in pattern classification, including a rigorous performance comparison of classifiers and regressors. The book presents architectures for multiclass classification and function approximation problems, as well as evaluation criteria for classifiers and regressors. Features: Clarifies the characteristics of two-class SVMs; Discusses kernel methods for improving the generalization ability of neural networks and fuzzy systems; Contains ample illustrations and examples; Includes performance evaluation using publicly available data sets; Examines Mahalanobis kernels, empirical feature space, and the effect of model selection by cross-validation; Covers sparse SVMs, learning using privileged information, semi-supervised learning, multiple classifier systems, and multiple kernel learning; Explores incremental training based batch training and active-set training methods, and decomposition techniques for linear programming SVMs; Discusses variable selection for support vector regressors.

Visual languages have long been lit pursuitofeffective communication 00 tween human and machine. Today, they are suecessfully employed for e: nd user progmmming, modeliog, rapid prototypmg, and design activities by people ofmany disciplines including arehitects, artists, children, engi neers, and scientists. Furthermore. with rapid advances ofthe Internet and Web technology, human human communication through the Web or eleo tronie mobile deviees is becoming more and moreprevalent This manuscript provides a comprehensive introduetion to diagmmmatiooI visual programming languages and the technologyofautomatie genemtion ofsnch languages. It covers a broad rangeofcontents from the underlying theoryofgraph grammars to the applications in various domains. Thecon tents were ex: l: l: aeted from the papers that my Ph. D. students and I have published in the last 10 years. and are updated and organized in a coherent fashion. The manuseript gives an in. -depth treatmentof all the topic areas. Pointers to related work and further readings are also faeilitated at the end ofeverychapterexeeptChapter 9. Rather than describing how to program visually, the manuscript discusses what are visual programming languages, and how sooh languages and their underlying foundations can be usefully applied to other fields incomputer science that need graphs as the p: rimary meansofrepresentation. Assuming the basic knowledge of computer programming and compiler co: nstruetion, the manuscript can be used as a textbook for senior orgradu ate computer science classes on visual languages, or a reference book for programming language classes, practitioners, and researchers inthe related field. The manuscript cannot be completed without the helps of many people.

This book contains the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Data Analysis and Processing held in Cefalu' (Palermo, ITALY) on September 23-25 1987. The aim of this Conference, now at its fourth edition, was to give a general view of the actual research in the area of methods and systems for achieving artificial vision as well as to have an up-dated information of the current activity in Europe. A number of invited speakers presented overviews of statistical classification problems and methods, non conventional archi tectures, mathematical morphology, robotic vision, analysis of range images in vision systems, pattern matching algorithms and astronomical data processing. Finally a survey of the discussion on the contribution of AI to Image Analysis is given. The papers presented at the Conference have been subdivided in four sections: knowledge based approaches, basic pattern recognition tools, multi features system based solutions, image analysis-applications. We must thank the IBM-Italia and the Digital Equipment Corpo ration for sponsoring this Conference. We feel that the days spent at Cefalu' were an important step toward the mutual exchange of scientific information within the image processing community. v. Cantoni Pavia University V. Di Gesu' Palermo University S. Levialdi Rome University v CONTENTS INVITED LECTURES . * * * * . * * * 3 Morphological Optics.

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in Second Generation Image and Video Coding Techniques. These techniques introduce new concepts from image analysis that greatly improve the performance of the coding schemes for very high compression. This interest has been further emphasized by the future MPEG 4 standard. Second generation image and video coding techniques are the ensemble of approaches proposing new and more efficient image representations than the conventional canonical form. As a consequence, the human visual system becomes a fundamental part of the encoding/decoding chain. More insight to distinguish between first and second generation can be gained if it is noticed that image and video coding is basically carried out in two steps. First, image data are converted into a sequence of messages and, second, code words are assigned to the messages. Methods of the first generation put the emphasis on the second step, whereas methods of the second generation put it on the first step and use available results for the second step. As a result of including the human visual system, second generation can be also seen as an approach of seeing the image composed by different entities called objects. This implies that the image or sequence of images have first to be analyzed and/or segmented in order to find the entities. It is in this context that we have selected in this book three main approaches as second generation video coding techniques: Segmentation-based schemes Model Based Schemes Fractal Based Schemes GBP/LISTGBP Video Coding: The Second Generation Approach is an important introduction to the new coding techniques for video. As such, all researchers, students and practitioners working in image processing will find this book of interest.

The computer interpretation of line drawings is a classic problem in arti?cial intelligence (AI) which has inspired the development of some fundamental AI tools, including constraint propagation, probabilistic relaxation, the characte- zation of tractable constraint classes and, most recently, the propagationof soft constraintsin?nite-domainoptimizationproblems. Line drawinginterpretation has many distinct applications on the borderline of computer vision and c- puter graphics, including sketch interpretation, the input of 3D object models 1 and the creation of 2 D illustrations in electronic documents. 2 I hope I have made this fascinating topic accessible not only to computer scientistsbutalsotomathematicians,psychologistsandcognitivescientistsand, indeed, to anyone who is intrigued by optical illusions and impossible or - biguous ?gures. This book could not have been written without the support of the CNRS, theFrenchCentreNational deRecherche Scienti?que,who?nancedmyone-year break from teaching at the University of Toulouse III. The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council also ?nanced several extended visits to the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Section 9.1 is just a brief summary of the results on tractable constraints that have come out of this very productive joint research programme with David Cohen, Peter Jeavons and Andrei Krokhin. The various soft arc consistency techniques described in Chapter 8 were developed in collaboration with Thomas Schiex and Simon de Givry at INRA, Toulouse. I am also grateful to Ralph Martin and Peter Varley for their comments on the line-labelling constraints presented in Chapter 3.

Human Identification Based on Gait is the first book to address gait as a biometric. Biometrics is now in a unique position where it affects most people's lives. This is especially true of "gait," which is one of the most recent biometrics. Recognizing people by the way they walk and run implies analyzing movement which, in turn, implies analyzing sequences of images, thus requiring memory and computational performance that became available only recently. Human Identification Based on Gait introduces developments from distinguished researchers within this relatively new area of biometrics. This book clearly establishes how human gait is biometric.

Human Identification Based on Gait is structured to meet the needs of professionals in industry, as well as advanced-level students in computer science.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI 2013, held in Seville, Spain, in March 2013. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 56 submissions and focus on geometric transforms, discrete and combinatorial tools for image segmentation and analysis, discrete and combinatorial topology, discrete shape representation, recognition and analysis, models for discrete geometry, morphological analysis and discrete tomography.

Although there has been much progress in developing theories, models and systems in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision Processing (VP) there has up to now been little progress on integrating these two subareas of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This book contains a set of edited papers on recent advances in the theories, computational models and systems of the integration of NLP and VP. The volume includes original work of notable researchers: Alex Waibel outlines multimodal interfaces including studies in speech, gesture and points; eye-gaze, lip motion and facial expression; hand writing, face recognition, face tracking and sound localization in a connectionist framework. Antony Cohen and John Gooday use spatial relations to describe visual languages. Naoguki Okada considers intentions of agents in visual environments. In addition to these studies, the volume includes many recent advances from North America, Europe and Asia demonstrating the fact that integration of Natural Language Processing and Vision is truly an international challenge.

COMPUTER VISION is a field of research that encompasses many objectives. A primary goal has been to construct visual sensors that can provide general-purpose robots with the same information about their surroundings as we receive from our own visual senses. This book takes an important step towards this goal by describing a working computer vision system named SCERPO. This system can recognize known three-dimensional objects in ordinary black-and-white images taken from unknown viewpoints, even when parts of the object are undetectable or hidden from view. A second major goal of computer vision re search is to provide a computational understanding of human vision. The research presented in this book has many implica tions for our understanding of human vision, particularly in the areas of perceptual organization and knowledge-based recogni tion. An attempt has been made to relate each computational result to the relevant areas in the psychology of vision. Since the material is meant to be accessible to a wide range of inter disciplinary readers, the book is written in plain language and attempts to explain most concepts from the starting position of the non-specialist. vii viii PREFACE One of the most important conclusions ansmg from this research is that visual recognition can commonly be achieved directly from the two-dimensional image without any prelim inary reconstruction of depth information or surface orienta tion from the visual input."

Overview Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the development of multi-sensory robot systems. The reason for this interest stems from a realization that there are fundamental limitations on the reconstruction of environment descriptions using only a single source of sensor information. If robot systems are ever to achieve a degree of intelligence and autonomy, they must be capable of using many different sources of sensory information in an active and dynamic manner. The observations made by the different sensors of a multi-sensor system are always uncertain, usually partial, occasionally spuri9us or incorrect and often geographically or geometrically imcomparable with other sensor views. The sensors of these systems are characterized by the diversity of information that they can provide and by the complexity of their operation. It is the goal of a multi sensor system to combine information from all these different sources into a robust and consistent description of the environment."