This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. The 19 papers presented in the 14th issue were organized in topical sections named: 3D modeling and visualization; image; e-learning and games; and miscellaneous.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2016, held in Rome, Italy, in February 2016. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 321 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on biomedical electronics and devices; bioimaging; bioinformatics models, methods and algorithms; bio-inspired systems and signal processing; health informatics.

This three volume set, CCIS 771, 772, 773, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the CCF Chinese Conference on Computer Vision, CCCV 2017, held in Tianjin, China, in October 2017. The total of 174 revised full papers presented in three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 465 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: biological vision inspired visual method; biomedical image analysis; computer vision applications; deep neural network; face and posture analysis; image and video retrieval; image color and texture; image composition; image quality assessment and analysis; image restoration; image segmentation and classification; image-based modeling; object detection and classification; object identification; photography and video; robot vision; shape representation and matching; statistical methods and learning; video analysis and event recognition; visual salient detection

This three volume set, CCIS 771, 772, 773, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the CCF Chinese Conference on Computer Vision, CCCV 2017, held in Tianjin, China, in October 2017. The total of 174 revised full papers presented in three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 465 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: biological vision inspired visual method; biomedical image analysis; computer vision applications; deep neural network; face and posture analysis; image and video retrieval; image color and texture; image composition; image quality assessment and analysis; image restoration; image segmentation and classification; image-based modeling; object detection and classification; object identification; photography and video; robot vision; shape representation and matching; statistical methods and learning; video analysis and event recognition; visual salient detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Smart Technology, MTYMEX 2017, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in May 2017. The 19 full papers were selected from 30 submissions and cover smart technologies for education, health, robotics, internet of things, virtual augmented and mixed reality technologies, artificial intelligence, gaming, software development, and digital arts.

This edited volume contains technical contributions in the field of computer vision and image processing presented at the First International Conference on Computer Vision and Image Processing (CVIP 2016). The contributions are thematically divided based on their relation to operations at the lower, middle and higher levels of vision systems, and their applications. The technical contributions in the areas of sensors, acquisition, visualization and enhancement are classified as related to low-level operations. They discuss various modern topics - reconfigurable image system architecture, Scheimpflug camera calibration, real-time autofocusing, climate visualization, tone mapping, super-resolution and image resizing. The technical contributions in the areas of segmentation and retrieval are classified as related to mid-level operations. They discuss some state-of-the-art techniques - non-rigid image registration, iterative image partitioning, egocentric object detection and video shot boundary detection. The technical contributions in the areas of classification and retrieval are categorized as related to high-level operations. They discuss some state-of-the-art approaches - extreme learning machines, and target, gesture and action recognition. A non-regularized state preserving extreme learning machine is presented for natural scene classification. An algorithm for human action recognition through dynamic frame warping based on depth cues is given. Target recognition in night vision through convolutional neural network is also presented. Use of convolutional neural network in detecting static hand gesture is also discussed. Finally, the technical contributions in the areas of surveillance, coding and data security, and biometrics and document processing are considered as applications of computer vision and image processing. They discuss some contemporary applications. A few of them are a system for tackling blind curves, a quick reaction target acquisition and tracking system, an algorithm to detect for copy-move forgery based on circle block, a novel visual secret sharing scheme using affine cipher and image interleaving, a finger knuckle print recognition system based on wavelet and Gabor filtering, and a palmprint recognition based on minutiae quadruplets.

Machine Vision systems combine image processing with industrial automation. One of the primary areas of application of Machine Vision in the Industry is in the area of Quality Control. Machine vision provides fast, economic and reliable inspection that improves quality as well as business productivity. Building machine vision applications is a challenging task as each application is unique, with its own requirements and desired outcome. A Guide to Machine Vision in Quality Control follows a practitioner's approach to learning machine vision. The book provides guidance on how to build machine vision systems for quality inspections. Practical applications from the Industry have been discussed to provide a good understanding of usage of machine vision for quality control. Real-world case studies have been used to explain the process of building machine vision solutions. The book offers comprehensive coverage of the essential topics, that includes: Introduction to Machine Vision Fundamentals of Digital Images Discussion of various machine vision system components Digital image processing related to quality control Overview of automation The book can be used by students and academics, as well as by industry professionals, to understand the fundamentals of machine vision. Updates to the on-going technological innovations have been provided with a discussion on emerging trends in machine vision and smart factories of the future. Sheila Anand, a Doctorate in Computer Science, is working as Professor in the Department of Informaton Technology at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India. She has over three decades of experience in teaching, consultancy, and research. She has worked in the software industry and has extensive experience in development of software applications and in systems audit of financial, manufacturing, and trading organizations. She guides PhD aspirants and many of her research scholars have since been awarded their doctoral degree. She has published many papers in national and international journals and is a reviewer for several journals of repute. L. Priya is a PhD graduate working as Professor and Head, Department of Information Technology at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India. She has nearly two decades of teaching experience and good exposure to consultancy and research. She has delivered many invited talks, presented papers, and won several paper awards at international conferences. She has published several papers in international journals and is a reviewer for SCI indexed journals. Her areas of interest include machine vision, wireless communication, and machine learning.

The book focuses on an image processing technique known as binarization. It provides a comprehensive survey over existing binarization techniques for both document and graphic images. A number of evaluation techniques have been presented for quantitative comparison of different binarization methods. The book provides results obtained comparing a number of standard and widely used binarization algorithms using some standard evaluation metrics. The comparative results presented in tables and charts facilitates understanding the process. In addition to this, the book presents techniques for preparing a reference image which is very much important for quantitative evaluation of the binarization techniques. The results are produced taking image samples from standard image databases.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the latest advances in the mathematical theory and computational tools for modeling high-dimensional data drawn from one or multiple low-dimensional subspaces (or manifolds) and potentially corrupted by noise, gross errors, or outliers. This challenging task requires the development of new algebraic, geometric, statistical, and computational methods for efficient and robust estimation and segmentation of one or multiple subspaces. The book also presents interesting real-world applications of these new methods in image processing, image and video segmentation, face recognition and clustering, and hybrid system identification etc. This book is intended to serve as a textbook for graduate students and beginning researchers in data science, machine learning, computer vision, image and signal processing, and systems theory. It contains ample illustrations, examples, and exercises and is made largely self-contained with three Appendices which survey basic concepts and principles from statistics, optimization, and algebraic-geometry used in this book. Rene Vidal is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Vision Dynamics and Learning Lab at The Johns Hopkins University. Yi Ma is Executive Dean and Professor at the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University. S. Shankar Sastry is Dean of the College of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

The two-volume set LNCS 10704 and 10705 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2018, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in February 2018. Of the 185 full papers submitted, 46 were selected for oral presentation and 28 for poster presentation; in addition, 5 papers were accepted for Multimedia Analytics: Perspectives, Techniques, and Applications, 12 extended abstracts for demonstrations ,and 9 accepted papers for Video Browser Showdown 2018. All papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions.

The two-volume set CCIS 662 and CCIS 663 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition, CCPR 2016, held in Chengdu, China, in November 2016.The 121 revised papers presented in two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 199 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on robotics; computer vision; basic theory of pattern recognition; image and video processing; speech and language; emotion recognition.

In Synthetic Vision: Using Volume Learning and Visual DNA, a holistic model of the human visual system is developed into a working model in C++, informed by the latest neuroscience, DNN, and computer vision research. The author's synthetic visual pathway model includes the eye, LGN, visual cortex, and the high level PFC learning centers. The corresponding visual genome model (VGM), begun in 2014, is introduced herein as the basis for a visual genome project analogous to the Human Genome Project funded by the US government. The VGM introduces volume learning principles and Visual DNA (VDNA) taking a multivariate approach beyond deep neural networks. Volume learning is modeled as programmable learning and reasoning agents, providing rich methods for structured agent classification networks. Volume learning incorporates a massive volume of multivariate features in various data space projections, collected into strands of Visual DNA, analogous to human DNA genes. VGM lays a foundation for a visual genome project to sequence VDNA as visual genomes in a public database, using collaborative research to move synthetic vision science forward and enable new applications. Bibliographical references are provided to key neuroscience, computer vision, and deep learning research, which form the basis for the biologically plausible VGM model and the synthetic visual pathway. The book also includes graphical illustrations and C++ API reference materials to enable VGM application programming. Open source code licenses are available for engineers and scientists. Scott Krig founded Krig Research to provide some of the world's first vision and imaging systems worldwide for military, industry, government, and academic use. Krig has worked for major corporations and startups in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, imaging, graphics, robotics and automation, computer security and cryptography. He has authored international patents in the areas of computer architecture, communications, computer security, digital imaging, and computer vision, and studied at Stanford. Scott Krig is the author of the English/Chinese Springer book Computer Vision Metrics, Survey, Taxonomy and Analysis of Computer Vision, Visual Neuroscience, and Deep Learning, Textbook Edition, as well as other books, articles, and papers.

This unique text/reference presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art in sparse representations, modeling and learning. The book examines both the theoretical foundations and details of algorithm implementation, highlighting the practical application of compressed sensing research in visual recognition and computer vision. Topics and features: describes sparse recovery approaches, robust and efficient sparse representation, and large-scale visual recognition; covers feature representation and learning, sparsity induced similarity, and sparse representation and learning-based classifiers; discusses low-rank matrix approximation, graphical models in compressed sensing, collaborative representation-based classification, and high-dimensional nonlinear learning; includes appendices outlining additional computer programming resources, and explaining the essential mathematics required to understand the book.

The need of video compression in the modern age of visual communication cannot be over-emphasized. This monograph will provide useful information to the postgraduate students and researchers who wish to work in the domain of VLSI design for video processing applications. In this book, one can find an in-depth discussion of several motion estimation algorithms and their VLSI implementation as conceived and developed by the authors. It records an account of research done involving fast three step search, successive elimination, one-bit transformation and its effective combination with diamond search and dynamic pixel truncation techniques. Two appendices provide a number of instances of proof of concept through Matlab and Verilog program segments. In this aspect, the book can be considered as first of its kind. The architectures have been developed with an eye to their applicability in everyday low-power handheld appliances including video camcorders and smartphones.

This book presents a new procedural modelling methodology capable of producing traversable buildings constrained by arbitrary convex shapes, based on a pure treemap approach. The authors establish a process to change the format of interior rooms, through wall number modification and offer an adaptation of a "fake-concave" technique to support non-convex building layouts. It will also include: * A proposal for an extensible building ontology to guide the methodology process and support the generation of other architectural style buildings (e.g. roman houses); * A presentation of an ontology-based grammar to provide the procedural modelling methodology with production rules; * Experimental computer managed processes for the stochastic generation of buildings. Most of the existing solutions regarding building interiors only focus on the generation of floor plans mainly composed of rectangular shapes. Yet there are a wide variety of ancient and contemporary buildings that are composed of shapes other than rectangles, both internally and externally. Ontology-based Procedural Modelling of Traversable Buildings Composed by Arbitrary Shapes will address this by providing the Procedural Modelling field with processes and techniques capable of properly supporting for example, digital preservation of cultural heritage or extensive virtual urban environment productions, specifically ones involving the generation/reconstruction of virtual buildings with such geometric requirements.

In many computer vision applications, objects have to be learned and recognized in images or image sequences. This book presents new probabilistic hierarchical models that allow an efficient representation of multiple objects of different categories, scales, rotations, and views. The idea is to exploit similarities between objects and object parts in order to share calculations and avoid redundant information. Furthermore inference approaches for fast and robust detection are presented. These new approaches combine the idea of compositional and similarity hierarchies and overcome limitations of previous methods. Besides classical object recognition the book shows the use for detection of human poses in a project for gait analysis. The use of activity detection is presented for the design of environments for ageing, to identify activities and behavior patterns in smart homes. In a presented project for parking spot detection using an intelligent vehicle, the proposed approaches are used to hierarchically model the environment of the vehicle for an efficient and robust interpretation of the scene in real-time.

This three volume set, CCIS 771, 772, 773, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the CCF Chinese Conference on Computer Vision, CCCV 2017, held in Tianjin, China, in October 2017. The total of 174 revised full papers presented in three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 465 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: biological vision inspired visual method; biomedical image analysis; computer vision applications; deep neural network; face and posture analysis; image and video retrieval; image color and texture; image composition; image quality assessment and analysis; image restoration; image segmentation and classification; image-based modeling; object detection and classification; object identification; photography and video; robot vision; shape representation and matching; statistical methods and learning; video analysis and event recognition; visual salient detection.

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.

This four-volume set (CCIS 643, 644, 645, 646) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Asia Simulation Conference and the First Autumn Simulation Multi-Conference, AsiaSim / SCS AutumnSim 2016, held in Beijing, China, in October 2016. The 265 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 651 submissions. The papers in this fourth volume of the set are organized in topical sections on Modeling and Simulation Applications; Simulation Software; Social Simulations; Verification, Validation and Accreditation.

This thesis demonstrates techniques that provide faster and more accurate solutions to a variety of problems in machine learning and signal processing. The author proposes a "greedy" algorithm, deriving sparse solutions with guarantees of optimality. The use of this algorithm removes many of the inaccuracies that occurred with the use of previous models.

Nowadays, highly-detailed animations of live-actor performances are increasingly easier to acquire and 3D Video has reached considerable attentions in visual media production. In this book, we address the problem of extracting or acquiring and then reusing non-rigid parametrization for video-based animations. At first sight, a crucial challenge is to reproduce plausible boneless deformations while preserving global and local captured properties of dynamic surfaces with a limited number of controllable, flexible and reusable parameters. To solve this challenge, we directly rely on a skin-detached dimension reduction thanks to the well-known cage-based paradigm. First, we achieve Scalable Inverse Cage-based Modeling by transposing the inverse kinematics paradigm on surfaces. Thus, we introduce a cage inversion process with user-specified screen-space constraints. Secondly, we convert non-rigid animated surfaces into a sequence of optimal cage parameters via Cage-based Animation Conversion. Building upon this reskinning procedure, we also develop a well-formed Animation Cartoonization algorithm for multi-view data in term of cage-based surface exaggeration and video-based appearance stylization. Thirdly, motivated by the relaxation of prior knowledge on the data, we propose a promising unsupervised approach to perform Iterative Cage-based Geometric Registration. This novel registration scheme deals with reconstructed target point clouds obtained from multi-view video recording, in conjunction with a static and wrinkled template mesh. Above all, we demonstrate the strength of cage-based subspaces in order to reparametrize highly non-rigid dynamic surfaces, without the need of secondary deformations. To the best of our knowledge this book opens the field of Cage-based Performance Capture.

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.

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).

This four-volume set (CCIS 643, 644, 645, 646) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Asia Simulation Conference and the First Autumn Simulation Multi-Conference, AsiaSim / SCS AutumnSim 2016, held in Beijing, China, in October 2016. The 265 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 651 submissions. The papers in this third volume of the set are organized in topical sections on Cloud technologies in simulation applications; fractional calculus with applications and simulations; modeling and simulation for energy, environment and climate; SBA virtual prototyping engineering technology; simulation and Big Data.

This, the 29th issue of the Transactions on Computational Science journal, is comprised of seven full papers focusing on the area of secure communication. Topics covered include weak radio signals, efficient circuits, multiple antenna sensing techniques, modes of inter-computer communication and fault types, geometric meshes, and big data processing in distributed environments.