By virtue of their special algebraic structures, Pythagorean-hodograph (PH) curves offer unique advantages for computer-aided design and manufacturing, robotics, motion control, path planning, computer graphics, animation, and related fields. This book offers a comprehensive and self-contained treatment of the mathematical theory of PH curves, including algorithms for their construction and examples of their practical applications. It emphasizes the interplay of ideas from algebra and geometry and their historical origins and includes many figures, worked examples, and detailed algorithm descriptions.

In recent years 3D geo-information has become an important research area due to the increased complexity of tasks in many geo-scientific applications, such as sustainable urban planning and development, civil engineering, risk and disaster management and environmental monitoring. Moreover, a paradigm of cross-application merging and integrating of 3D data is observed. The problems and challenges facing today's 3D software, generally application-oriented, focus almost exclusively on 3D data transportability issues - the ability to use data originally developed in one modelling/visualisation system in other and vice versa. Tools for elaborated 3D analysis, simulation and prediction are either missing or, when available, dedicated to specific tasks. In order to respond to this increased demand, a new type of system has to be developed. A fully developed 3D geo-information system should be able to manage 3D geometry and topology, to integrate 3D geometry and thematic information, to analyze both spatial and topological relationships, and to present the data in a suitable form. In addition to the simple geometry types like point line and polygon, a large variety of parametric representations, freeform curves and surfaces or sweep shapes have to be supported. Approaches for seamless conversion between 3D raster and 3D vector representations should be available, they should allow analysis of a representation most suitable for a specific application.

This book covers the MPEG H.264 and MS VC-1 video coding standards as well as issues in broadband video delivery over IP networks. This professional reference is designed for industry practitioners, including video engineers, and professionals in consumer electronics, telecommunications and media compression industries. The book is also suitable as a secondary text for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

This book traces progress in photography since the first pinhole, or camera obscura, architecture. The authors describe innovations such as photogrammetry, and omnidirectional vision for robotic navigation. The text shows how new camera architectures create a need to master related projective geometries for calibration, binocular stereo, static or dynamic scene understanding. Written by leading researchers in the field, this book also explores applications of alternative camera architectures.

This book presents the thoroughly revised versions of lectures given by leading researchers during the Workshop on Advanced 3D Imaging for Safety and Security in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR 2005, held in San Diego, CA, USA in June 2005. It covers the current state of the art in 3D imaging for safety and security.

A sharp increase in the computing power of modern computers has triggered the development of powerful algorithms that can analyze complex patterns in large amounts of data within a short time period. Consequently, it has become possible to apply pattern recognition techniques to new tasks. The main goal of this book is to cover some of the latest application domains of pattern recognition while presenting novel techniques that have been developed or customized in those domains.

Image and Video Encryption provides a unified overview of techniques for encryption of images and video data. This ranges from commercial applications like DVD or DVB to more research oriented topics and recently published material. This volume introduces different techniques from unified viewpoint, then evaluates these techniques with respect to their respective properties (e.g., security, speed.....).

The authors experimentally compare different approaches proposed in the literature and include an extensive bibliography of corresponding published material.

Multimodal Video Characterization and Summarization is a valuable research tool for both professionals and academicians working in the video field.

This book describes the methodology for using multimodal audio, image, and text technology to characterize video content. This new and groundbreaking science has led to many advances in video understanding, such as the development of a video summary. Applications and methodology for creating video summaries are described, as well as user-studies for evaluation and testing.

This is the first book which informs about recent progress in biomechanics, computer vision and computer graphics - all in one volume. Researchers from these areas have contributed to this book to promote the establishment of human motion research as a multi-facetted discipline and to improve the exchange of ideas and concepts between these three areas. The book combines carefully written reviews with detailed reports on recent progress in research.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 18th Annual International Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography, SAC 2011, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2011. The 23 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cryptanalysis of hash functions, security in clouds, bits and randomness, cryptanalysis of ciphers, cryptanalysis of public-key crypthography, cipher implementation, new designs and mathematical aspects of applied cryptography.

Abstract Biological vision is a rather fascinating domain of research. Scientists of various origins like biology, medicine, neurophysiology, engineering, math ematics, etc. aim to understand the processes leading to visual perception process and at reproducing such systems. Understanding the environment is most of the time done through visual perception which appears to be one of the most fundamental sensory abilities in humans and therefore a significant amount of research effort has been dedicated towards modelling and repro ducing human visual abilities. Mathematical methods play a central role in this endeavour. Introduction David Marr's theory v DEGREESas a pioneering step tov DEGREESards understanding visual percep tion. In his view human vision was based on a complete surface reconstruction of the environment that was then used to address visual subtasks. This approach was proven to be insufficient by neuro-biologists and complementary ideas from statistical pattern recognition and artificial intelligence were introduced to bet ter address the visual perception problem. In this framework visual perception is represented by a set of actions and rules connecting these actions. The emerg ing concept of active vision consists of a selective visual perception paradigm that is basically equivalent to recovering from the environment the minimal piece information required to address a particular task of interest."

This book presents the most recent achievements in some rapidly developing fields within Computer Science. This includes the very latest research in biometrics and computer security systems, and descriptions of the latest inroads in artificial intelligence applications. The book contains over 30 articles by well-known scientists and engineers. The articles are extended versions of works introduced at the ACS-CISIM 2005 conference.

Traditionally, say 15 years ago, three-dimensional image analysis (aka computer vi sion) and three-dimensional image synthesis (aka computer graphics) were separate fields. Rarely were expert"

This book contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at three satellite events that were held in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2010, in Hong Kong, China, in December 2010. The collection comprises a total of 40 contributions that originate from the First International Symposium on Web Intelligent Systems and Services (WISS 2010), from the First International Workshop on Cloud Information Systems Engineering (CISE 2010) and from the Second International Workshop on Mobile Business Collaboration (MBC 2010). The papers address a wide range of hot topics and are organized in topical sections on: decision and e-markets; rules and XML; web service intelligence; semantics and services; analyzing web resources; engineering web systems; intelligent web applications; web communities and personalization; cloud information system engineering; mobile business collaboration.

This is the first edited book that deals with the special topic of signals and images within Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Signal-interpreting systems are becoming increasingly popular in medical, industrial, ecological, biotechnological and many other applications. Existing statistical and knowledge-based techniques lack robustness, accuracy and flexibility. New strategies are needed that can adapt to changing environmental conditions, signal variation, user needs and process requirements. Introducing CBR strategies into signal-interpreting systems can satisfy these requirements.

Conceptually, a database consists of objects and relationships. Object Relationship Notation (ORN) is a simple notation that more precisely defines relationships by combining UML multiplicities with uniquely defined referential actions.

This book shows how ORN can be used in UML class diagrams and database definition languages (DDLs) to better model and implement relationships and thus more productively develop database applications. For the database developer, it presents many examples of relationships modeled using ORN-extended class diagrams and shows how these relationships are easily mapped to an ORN-extended SQL or Object DDL. For the DBMS developer, it presents the specifications and algorithms needed to implement ORN in a relational and object DBMS.

This book also describes tools that can be downloaded or accessed via the Web. These tools allow databases to be modeled using ORN and implemented using automatic code generation that adds ORN support to Microsoft SQL Server and Progress Object Store.

Object Relationship Notation (ORN) for Database Applications: Enhancing the Modeling and Implementation of Associations is written for research scientists, research libraries, professionals, and advanced-level students in computer science.

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the mid-1970s, I inherited a unique c- puter vision laboratory from the doctoral research of previous students. They had designed and built an early frame-grabber to deliver digitized color video from a (very large) electronic video camera on a tripod to a mini-computer (sic) with a (huge ) disk drive-about the size of four washing machines. They had also - signed a binary image array processor and programming language, complete with a user's guide, to facilitate designing software for this one-of-a-kindprocessor. The overall system enabled programmable real-time image processing at video rate for many operations. I had the whole lab to myself. I designed software that detected an object in the eldofview, trackeditsmovementsinrealtime, anddisplayedarunningdescription of the events in English. For example: "An object has appeared in the upper right corner...Itismovingdownandtotheleft...Nowtheobjectisgettingcloser...The object moved out of sight to the left"-about like that. The algorithms were simple, relying on a suf cient image intensity difference to separate the object from the background (a plain wall). From computer vision papers I had read, I knew that vision in general imaging conditions is much more sophisticated. But it worked, it was great fun, and I was hooked.

Generally speaking, Biosignals refer to signals recorded from the human body. They can be either electrical (e. g. Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalogram (EEG), Electromyogram (EMG), etc. ) or non-electrical (e. g. breathing, movements, etc. ). The acquisition and processing of such signals play an important role in clinical routines. They are usually considered as major indicators which provide clinicians and physicians with useful information during diagnostic and monitoring processes. In some applications, the purpose is not necessarily medical. It may also be industrial. For instance, a real-time EEG system analysis can be used to control and analyze the vigilance of a car driver. In this case, the purpose of such a system basically consists of preventing crash risks. Furthermore, in certain other appli- tions, asetof biosignals (e. g. ECG, respiratorysignal, EEG, etc. ) can be used toc- trol or analyze human emotions. This is the case of the famous polygraph system, also known as the "lie detector," the ef ciency of which remains open to debate Thus when one is dealing with biosignals, special attention must be given to their acquisition, their analysis and their processing capabilities which constitute the nal stage preceding the clinical diagnosis. Naturally, the diagnosis is based on the information provided by the processing system.

Computational methodologies of signal processing and imaging analysis, namely considering 2D and 3D images, are commonly used in different applications of the human society. For example, Computational Vision systems are progressively used for surveillance tasks, traf?c analysis, recognition process, inspection p- poses, human-machine interfaces, 3D vision and deformation analysis. One of the main characteristics of the Computational Vision domain is its int- multidisciplinary. In fact, in this domain, methodologies of several more fundam- tal sciences, such as Informatics, Mathematics, Statistics, Psychology, Mechanics and Physics are usually used. Besides this inter-multidisciplinary characteristic, one of the main reasons that contributes for the continually effort done in this domain of the human knowledge is the number of applications in the medical area. For instance, it is possible to consider the use of statistical or physical procedures on medical images in order to model the represented structures. This modeling can have different goals, for example: shape reconstruction, segmentation, registration, behavior interpretation and simulation, motion and deformation analysis, virtual reality, computer-assisted therapy or tissue characterization. The main objective of the ECCOMAS Thematic Conferences on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing (VIPimage) is to promote a comprehensive forum for discussion on the recent advances in the related ?elds trying to id- tify widespread areas of potential collaboration between researchers of different sciences.

Computer vision and image analysis require interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematics and engineering. This book addresses the area of high-accuracy measurements of length, curvature, motion parameters and other geometrical quantities from acquired image data. It is a common problem that these measurements are incomplete or noisy, such that considerable efforts are necessary to regularise the data, to fill in missing information, and to judge the accuracy and reliability of these results. This monograph brings together contributions from researchers in computer vision, engineering and mathematics who are working in this area.

The book can be read both by specialists and graduate students in computer science, electrical engineering or mathematics who take an interest in data evaluations by approximation or interpolation, in particular data obtained in an image analysis context.

Motivated learning is an emerging research field in artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling. Computational models of motivation extend reinforcement learning to adaptive, multitask learning in complex, dynamic environments - the goal being to understand how machines can develop new skills and achieve goals that were not predefined by human engineers. In particular, this book describes how motivated reinforcement learning agents can be used in computer games for the design of non-player characters that can adapt their behaviour in response to unexpected changes in their environment.

This book covers the design, application and evaluation of computational models of motivation in reinforcement learning. The authors start with overviews of motivation and reinforcement learning, then describe models for motivated reinforcement learning. The performance of these models is demonstrated by applications in simulated game scenarios and a live, open-ended virtual world.

Researchers in artificial intelligence, machine learning and artificial life will benefit from this book, as will practitioners working on complex, dynamic systems - in particular multiuser, online games.

From grading and preparing harvested vegetables to the tactile probing of a patient 's innermost recesses, mechatronics has become part of our way of life. This cutting-edge volume features the 30 best papers of the 13th International Conference on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice. Although there is no shortage of theoretical and technical detail in these chapters, they have a common theme in that they describe work that has been applied in practice.

This book deals with various image processing and machine vision problems efficiently with splines and includes: the significance of Bernstein Polynomial in splines, detailed coverage of Beta-splines applications which are relatively new, Splines in motion tracking, various deformative models and their uses. Finally the book covers wavelet splines which are efficient and effective in different image applications.

Computer security - the protection of data and computer systems from intentional, malicious intervention - is attracting increasing attention. Much work has gone into development of tools to detect ongoing or already perpetrated attacks, but a key shortfall in current intrusion detection systems is the high number of false alarms they produce. This book analyzes the false alarm problem, then applies results from the field of information visualization to the problem of intrusion detection. Four different visualization approaches are presented, mainly applied to data from web server access logs.

The five volume set CCIS 224-228 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International conference on Applied Informatics and Communication, ICAIC 2011, held in Xi'an, China in August 2011.

The 446 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a broad range of topics in computer science and interdisciplinary applications including control, hardware and software systems, neural computing, wireless networks, information systems, and image processing.