Scalar diffraction from a circular aperture is a ubiquitous problem that arises in a variety of disciplines, such as optics (lenses), acoustics (speakers), electromagnetics (dish antennas), and ultrasonics (piston transducers). The problem endures despite centuries of research because each new generation of researchers rediscovers it and adds some novel insight or new result to the existing literature. Scalar Diffraction from a Circular Aperture promises a few new results and several novel insights, particularly with regard to spatial averaging. Although the text emphasizes ultrasonic diffraction, the results and insights developed are general and may be applied to the many practical problems involving scalar diffraction from a circular aperture. Included are novel insights on mirror-image diffraction, autoconvolution diffraction, and coherent and incoherent averaging. Examples from ultrasonic imaging, a coherent imaging modality, are used to develop a fairly general theory that connects over a century of research on scalar diffraction from a circular aperture. The material is based on a synthesis of mathematics, physical optics, linear systems theory, and scalar diffraction theory. Thus, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and students working in optics, acoustics, antenna design, biomedical engineering, non-destructive testing, and astronomy will find Scalar Diffraction from a Circular Aperture interesting, provocative, and useful.

Here is the first of a two-volume set (LNCS 8021 and 8022) that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, VAMR 2013, held as part of the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2013, held in Las Vegas, USA in July 2013, jointly with 12 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1666 papers and 303 posters presented at the HCII 2013 conferences was carefully reviewed and selected from 5210 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation 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 total of 88 contributions included in the VAMR proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this two-volume set. The papers included in this volume are organized in the following topical sections: developing augmented and virtual environments, interaction in augmented and virtual environments, human-robot interaction in virtual environments, and presence and tele-presence.; healthcare and medical applications; virtual and augmented environments for learning and education; business, industrial and military applications; culture and entertainment applications.

This book presents a detailed analysis of spectral imaging, describing how it can be used for the purposes of material identification, object recognition and scene understanding. The opportunities and challenges of combining spatial and spectral information are explored in depth, as are a wide range of applications. Features: discusses spectral image acquisition by hyperspectral cameras, and the process of spectral image formation; examines models of surface reflectance, the recovery of photometric invariants, and the estimation of the illuminant power spectrum from spectral imagery; describes spectrum representations for the interpolation of reflectance and radiance values, and the classification of spectra; reviews the use of imaging spectroscopy for material identification; explores the recovery of reflection geometry from image reflectance; investigates spectro-polarimetric imagery, and the recovery of object shape and material properties using polarimetric images captured from a single view.

The three volume set LNCS 8834, LNCS 8835, and LNCS 8836 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2014, held in Kuching, Malaysia, in November 2014. The 231 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 375 submissions. The selected papers cover major topics of theoretical research, empirical study, and applications of neural information processing research. The 3 volumes represent topical sections containing articles on cognitive science, neural networks and learning systems, theory and design, applications, kernel and statistical methods, evolutionary computation and hybrid intelligent systems, signal and image processing, and special sessions intelligent systems for supporting decision, making processes, theories and applications, cognitive robotics, and learning systems for social network and web mining.

Throughout much of machine vision's early years the infrared imagery has suffered from return on investment despite its advantages over visual counterparts. Recently, the ?scal momentum has switched in favor of both manufacturers and practitioners of infrared technology as a result of today's rising security and safety challenges and advances in thermographic sensors and their continuous drop in costs. This yielded a great impetus in achieving ever better performance in remote surveillance, object recognition, guidance, noncontact medical measurements, and more. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to recent successful efforts made on merging computer vision applications (nonmilitary only) and nonvisual imagery, as well as to ?ll in the need in the literature for an up-to-date convenient reference on machine vision and infrared technologies. Augmented Perception in Infrared provides a comprehensive review of recent deployment of infrared sensors in modern applications of computer vision, along with in-depth description of the world's best machine vision algorithms and intel- gent analytics. Its topics encompass many disciplines of machine vision, including remote sensing, automatic target detection and recognition, background modeling and image segmentation, object tracking, face and facial expression recognition, - variant shape characterization, disparate sensors fusion, noncontact physiological measurements, night vision, and target classi?cation. Its application scope includes homeland security, public transportation, surveillance, medical, and military. Mo- over, this book emphasizes the merging of the aforementioned machine perception applications and nonvisual imaging in intensi?ed, near infrared, thermal infrared, laser, polarimetric, and hyperspectral bands.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 36th German Conference on Pattern Recognition, GCPR 2014, held in Munster, Germany, in September 2014. The 58 revised full papers and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on variational models for depth and flow, reconstruction, bio-informatics, deep learning and segmentation, feature computation, video interpretation, segmentation and labeling, image processing and analysis, human pose and people tracking, interpolation and inpainting.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition, CCBR 2014, held in Shenyang, China, in November 2014. The 60 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from among 90 submissions. The papers focus on face, fingerprint and palmprint, vein biometrics, iris and ocular biometrics, behavioral biometrics, application and system of biometrics, multi-biometrics and information fusion, other biometric recognition and processing.

Geometric modelling has been an important and interesting subject for many years from the purely mathematical and computer science viewpoint, and also from the standpoint of engineering and various other applications, such as CAD/CAM, entertainment, animation, and multimedia. This book focuses on the interaction between the theoretical foundation of geometric modelling and practical applications in CAD and related areas. Geometric Modelling: Theoretical and Computational Basis towards Advanced CAD Applications starts with two position papers, discussing basic computational theory and practical system solutions. The well-organized seven review papers give a systematic overview of the current situation and deep insight for future research and development directions towards the reality of shape representation and processing. They discuss various aspects of important issues, such as geometric computation for space search and shape generation, parametric modelling, feature modelling, user interface for geometric modelling, geometric modelling for the Next Generation CAD, and geometric/shape standard. Other papers discuss features and new research directions in geometric modelling, solid modeling, free-form surface modeling, intersection calculation, mesh modeling and reverse engineering. They cover a wide range of geometric modelling issues to show the problem scope and the technological importance. Researchers interested in the current status of geometric modelling research and developments will find this volume to be an essential reference.

This monograph is devoted to the description of the physical fundamentals of laser refractography-a novel informational-measuring technique for the diagnostics of optically inhomogeneous media and flows, based on the idea of using spatially structured probe laser radiation in combination with its digital recording and c- puter techniques for the differential processing of refraction patterns. Considered are the physical fundamentals of this technique, actual optical schemes, methods of processing refraction patterns, and possible applications. This informational technique can be employed in such areas of science and technology as require remote nonperturbative monitoring of optical, thermophysical, chemical, aerohydrodynamic, and manufacturing processes. The monograph can also be recommended for students and postgraduates of - formational, laser, electro-optical, thermophysical, chemical, and other specialties. Laser refractography is a conceptually novel refraction method for the diagn- tics of inhomogeneous media, based on the idea of using spatially structured probe laser radiation in combination with its digital recording and computer techniques for the differential processing of refraction patterns.

A long long time ago, echoing philosophical and aesthetic principles that existed since antiquity, William of Ockham enounced the principle of parsimony, better known today as Ockham's razor: "Entities should not be multiplied without neces sity. " This principle enabled scientists to select the "best" physical laws and theories to explain the workings of the Universe and continued to guide scienti?c research, leadingtobeautifulresultsliketheminimaldescriptionlength approachtostatistical inference and the related Kolmogorov complexity approach to pattern recognition. However, notions of complexity and description length are subjective concepts anddependonthelanguage"spoken"whenpresentingideasandresults. The?eldof sparse representations, that recently underwent a Big Bang like expansion, explic itly deals with the Yin Yang interplay between the parsimony of descriptions and the "language" or "dictionary" used in them, and it became an extremely exciting area of investigation. It already yielded a rich crop of mathematically pleasing, deep and beautiful results that quickly translated into a wealth of practical engineering applications. You are holding in your hands the ?rst guide book to Sparseland, and I am sure you'll ?nd in it both familiar and new landscapes to see and admire, as well as ex cellent pointers that will help you ?nd further valuable treasures. Enjoy the journey to Sparseland! Haifa, Israel, December 2009 Alfred M. Bruckstein vii Preface This book was originally written to serve as the material for an advanced one semester (fourteen 2 hour lectures) graduate course for engineering students at the Technion, Israel.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Workshops held at the 8th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, AIAI 2012, in Halkidiki, Greece, in September 2012. The book includes a total of 66 interesting and innovative research papers from the following 8 workshops: the Second Artificial Intelligence Applications in Biomedicine Workshop (AIAB 2012), the First AI in Education Workshop: Innovations and Applications (AIeIA 2012), the Second International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Software Engineering (CISE 2012), the First Conformal Prediction and Its Applications Workshop (COPA 2012), the First Intelligent Innovative Ways for Video-to-Video Communiccation in Modern Smart Cities Workshop (IIVC 2012), the Third Intelligent Systems for Quality of Life Information Services Workshop (ISQL 2012), the First Mining Humanistic Data Workshop (MHDW 2012), and the First Workshop on Algorithms for Data and Text Mining in Bioinformatics (WADTMB 2012).

This book will address the advances, applications, research results, and emerging areas of optics, photonics, computational approaches, nano-photonics, bio-photonics, with applications in information systems. The objectives are to bring together novel approaches, analysis, models, and technologies that enhance sensing, measurement, processing, interpretation, and visualization of information. The book will concentrate on new approaches to information systems, including integration of computational algorithms, bio-inspired models, photonics technologies, information security, bio-photonics, and nano-photonics. Applications include bio-photonics, digitally enhanced sensing and imaging systems, multi-dimensional optical imaging and image processing, bio-inspired imaging, 3D visualization, 3D displays, imaging on nano-scale, quantum optics, super resolution imaging, photonics for biological applications, microscopy, information optics, and holographic information systems.

Today, autonomous robots are used in a rather limited range of applications such as exploration of inaccessible locations, cleaning floors, mowing lawns etc. However, ongoing hardware improvements (and human fantasy) steadily reveal new robotic applications of significantly higher sophistication. For such applications, the crucial bottleneck in the engineering process tends to shift from physical boundaries to controller generation. As an attempt to automatize this process, Evolutionary Robotics has successfully been used to generate robotic controllers of various types. However, a major challenge of the field remains the evolution of truly complex behavior. Furthermore, automatically created controllers often lack analyzability which makes them useless for safety-critical applications. In this book, a simple controller model based on Finite State Machines is proposed which allows a straightforward analysis of evolved behaviors. To increase the model's evolvability, a procedure is introduced which, by adapting the genotype-phenotype mapping at runtime, efficiently traverses both the behavioral search space as well as (recursively) the search space of genotype-phenotype mappings. Furthermore, a data-driven mathematical framework is proposed which can be used to calculate the expected success of evolution in complex environments.

This book brings together several advanced topics in computer graphics that are important in the areas of game development, three-dimensional animation and real-time rendering. The book is designed for final-year undergraduate or first-year graduate students, who are already familiar with the basic concepts in computer graphics and programming. It aims to provide a good foundation of advanced methods such as skeletal animation, quaternions, mesh processing and collision detection. These and other methods covered in the book are fundamental to the development of algorithms used in commercial applications as well as research.

Computer vision is the science and technology of making machines that see. It is concerned with the theory, design and implementation of algorithms that can automatically process visual data to recognize objects, track and recover their shape and spatial layout. The International Computer Vision Summer School - ICVSS was established in 2007 to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in Computer Vision. The courses are delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry, and cover both theoretical and practical aspects of real Computer Vision problems. The school is organized every year by University of Cambridge (Computer Vision and Robotics Group) and University of Catania (Image Processing Lab). Different topics are covered each year. A summary of the past Computer Vision Summer Schools can be found at: http://www.dmi.unict.it/icvss This edited volume contains a selection of articles covering some of the talks and tutorials held during the last editions of the school. The chapters provide an in-depth overview of challenging areas with key references to the existing literature.

This book - in conjunction with the volumes LNCS 8588 and LNBI 8590 - constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Computing, ICIC 2014, held in Taiyuan, China, in August 2014. The 85 papers of this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as soft computing; artificial bee colony algorithms; unsupervised learning; kernel methods and supporting vector machines; machine learning; fuzzy theory and algorithms; image processing; intelligent computing in computer vision; intelligent computing in communication networks; intelligent image/document retrievals; intelligent data analysis and prediction; intelligent agent and Web applications; intelligent fault diagnosis; knowledge representation/reasoning; knowledge discovery and data mining; natural language processing and computational linguistics; next gen sequencing and metagenomics; intelligent computing in scheduling and engineering optimization; advanced modeling, control and optimization techniques for complex engineering systems; complex networks and their applications; time series forecasting and analysis using artificial neural networks; computer human interaction using multiple visual cues and intelligent computing; biometric system and security for intelligent computing.

Video segmentation has become one of the core areas in visual signal processing research. The objective of Video Segmentation and Its Applications is to present the latest advances in video segmentation and analysis techniques while covering the theoretical approaches, real applications and methods being developed in the computer vision and video analysis community. The book will also provide researchers and practitioners a comprehensive understanding of state-of-the-art of video segmentation techniques and a resource for potential applications and successful practice.

Exploring theories and applications developed during the last 30 years, Digital Geometry in Image Processing presents a mathematical treatment of the properties of digital metric spaces and their relevance in analyzing shapes in two and three dimensions. Unlike similar books, this one connects the two areas of image processing and digital geometry, highlighting important results of digital geometry that are currently used in image analysis and processing. The book discusses different digital geometries in multi-dimensional integral coordinate spaces. It also describes interesting properties of the geometries, including metric and topological properties, shapes of circles and spheres, proximity to Euclidean norms, and number theoretic representations of geometric objects such as straight lines and circles. The authors-all active researchers in image processing and digital geometry-demonstrate how these concepts and properties are useful in various techniques for image processing and analysis. In particular, the book covers applications in object representation and shape analysis. With many figures (some in color) and end-of-chapter exercises, this book provides an in-depth, unified account of digital metrics, the characterization of digital curves and straight lines, and their uses in shape analysis. It gives you insight on the latest two- and three-dimensional image processing applications.

Good or bad level design can make or break any game, so it is surprising how little reference material exists for level designers. Beginning level designers have a limited understanding of the tools and techniques they can use to achieve their goals, or even define them. This book is the first to use a conceptual and theoretical foundation to build such a set of practical tools and techniques. It is tied to no particular technology or genre, so it will be a useful reference for many years to come. Kremers covers many concepts universal to level design, such as interactivity, world building, immersion, sensory perception, pace, and more, and he shows how to apply these concepts in practical ways, with many examples from real games.

This book provides an overview of the X Window System focusing on characteristics that have significant impact on the development of both application programs and widgets. We pay special attention to applications that go beyond graphical user interfaces (GUIs); therefore we discuss issues affecting video games, visualization and imaging programs, and designing widgets with a complex appearance. While the book does not assume previous knowledge of X, it is intended for experienced programmers, especially those who want to write programs that go beyond simple GUIs. X is the dominant window system under Unix, and X servers are available for Microsoft Windows, thus enabling graphics over a network in the PC world. While Java offers an apparently universal graphics library (the abstract window toolkit), the reality is quite different: For high-quality graphics and image display, we must program on the target platform itself (X or one of Microsoft's APIs) rather than rely on Java peer objects. X is a vast subject, so it is impossible to provide a complete coverage in a few hundred pages. Thus we selected topics that are fundamental to the system, so that the reader who masters them should be able to read the documentation of the numerous libraries and toolkits. Therefore we provide documentation on the most important Xlib and X toolkit functions only.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2014, held in Novi Sad, Serbia. The 56 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 initial submissions. It is a conference with long tradition that attracts researchers in the area of computer speech processing (recognition, synthesis, understanding etc.) and related domains (including signal processing, language and text processing, multi-modal speech processing or human-computer interaction for instance).

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mathematical Methods for Curves and Surfaces, MMCS 2012, held in Oslo, Norway, in June/July 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 135 submissions. The topics range from mathematical analysis of various methods to practical implementation on modern graphics processing units. The papers reflect the newest developments in these fields and also point to the latest literature.

PDE & Level Sets: Algorithmic Approaches to Static & Motion Imagery is specially dedicated to the segmentation of complex shapes from the field of imaging sciences using level sets and PDEs. It covers the fundamentals of level sets, different kinds of concepts of both geodesic curvature flows and planar flows, as well as the power of incorporation of regional-statistics in level set framework. In covering this material, this book presents segmentation of object-in-motion imagery based on level sets in eigen analysis framework, while also presenting classical problems of boundary completion in cognitive images, like the pop-up of subjective contours in the famous triangle of Kanizsa using surface evolution framework, or the mean curvature evolution of a graph with respect to the Riemannian metric induced by the image. All results are presented for modal completion of cognitive objects with missing boundaries.
PDE & Level Sets: Algorithmic Approaches to Static & Motion Imagery is aimed at researchers and educators in imaging sciences, biomedical engineering, applied mathematics, algorithmic development, computer vision, signal processing, computer graphics and multimedia in general, both in academia and industry.
Key Features: -Presents detailed review of PDEs and level sets,
-Covers concepts of geodesic curvature flows and planar flows,
-Offers advance applications of level sets for crack propagation and planar cracks,
-Describes multi-resolution level sets for segmentation of video images,
-Identifies fusion of fuzzy techniques in level set framework,
-Discusses the role of subjective surfaces and Riemannian metric.

This book collects a series of research papers in the area of Image Processing and Communications which not only introduce a summary of current technology but also give an outlook of potential feature problems in this area. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in image processing and communications. The book is divided into two parts and presents the proceedings of the 6th International Image Processing and Communications Conference (IP&C 2014) held in Bydgoszcz, 10-12 September 2014. Part I deals with image processing. A comprehensive survey of different methods of image processing, computer vision is also presented. Part II deals with the telecommunications networks and computer networks. Applications in these areas are considered.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems, MCS 2013, held in Nanjing, China, in May 2013. The 34 revised papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers address issues in multiple classifier systems and ensemble methods, including pattern recognition, machine learning, neural network, data mining and statistics.