Just a few years ago, virtual reality was regarded as more a toy than a tool. Today, however, it is becoming the enabling technology for man-machine communications. The rapid development of graphics hardware and soft ware makes its application possible. Besides building walkthroughs and landscape fly-overs with very realistic visual effects, we can recognize the trend toward industrial applications. This is because of the emerging need for tools for rapid product development. Especially in the aeronautical and automotive industries, companies have began to investigate and develop virtual reality tools for their own needs in co-operation with research or ganizations. In co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD), the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt established the German working group on virtual reality in 1993 as a forum for infor mation exchange between industry and research. German researchers, system developers, and industrial users have met several times in Darm stadt at the Computer Graphics Center. In these meetings they discussed the essential issues inherent in applying virtual reality to industrial appli cations and exchanged their latest research results and experiences.

This state-of-the-art survey features topics related to the impact of multicore, manycore, and coprocessor technologies in science and large-scale applications in an interdisciplinary environment. The papers included in this survey cover research in mathematical modeling, design of parallel algorithms, aspects of microprocessor architecture, parallel programming languages, hardware-aware computing, heterogeneous platforms, manycore technologies, performance tuning, and requirements for large-scale applications. The contributions presented in this volume are an outcome of an inspiring conference conceived and organized by the editors at the University of Applied Sciences (HfT) in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 2012. The 10 revised full papers selected from 21 submissions are presented together with the twelve poster abstracts and focus on combination of new aspects of microprocessor technologies, parallel applications, numerical simulation, and software development; thus they clearly show the potential of emerging technologies in the area of multicore and manycore processors that are paving the way towards personal supercomputing and very likely towards exascale computing.

Change detection using remotely sensed images has many applications, such as urban monitoring, land-cover change analysis, and disaster management. This work investigates two-dimensional change detection methods. The existing methods in the literature are grouped into four categories: pixel-based, transformation-based, texture analysis-based, and structure-based. In addition to testing existing methods, four new change detection methods are introduced: fuzzy logic-based, shadow detection-based, local feature-based, and bipartite graph matching-based. The latter two methods form the basis for a structural analysis of change detection. Three thresholding algorithms are compared, and their effects on the performance of change detection methods are measured. These tests on existing and novel change detection methods make use of a total of 35 panchromatic and multi-spectral Ikonos image sets. Quantitative test results and their interpretations are provided.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2012, held in Santa Cruz, CA, USA, in September 2012. The 17 revised full papers presented together with 31 short papers and 18 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on IVAs on learning environments; emotion and personality; evaluation and empirical studies; multimodal perception and expression; narrative and interactive applications; social interaction; authoring and tools; conceptual frameworks.

Active Contours deals with the analysis of moving images - a topic of growing importance within the computer graphics industry. In particular it is concerned with understanding, specifying and learning prior models of varying strength and applying them to dynamic contours. Its aim is to develop and analyse these modelling tools in depth and within a consistent framework.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Depth Image Analysis, held in conjunction with ICPR 2012 in Japan in November 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented at the workshop were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions and are complemented with 3 invited papers that were also peer-reviewed. The papers are organized in topical sections on acquisition and modeling of depth data, processing and analysis of depth data, applications, and ICPR contest.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW 2011) held in Atlantic City, NJ, USA, during October 23-26, 2011. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 59 submissions. Conference papers are organized in 6 technical sessions, covering the topics of steganography and steganalysis, watermarking, visual cryptography, forensics, anti-forensics, fingerprinting, privacy and security.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Sino-foreign-interchange Workshop on Intelligence Science and Intelligent Data Engineering, IScIDE 2011, held in Xi'an, China, in October 2011. The 97 papers presented were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 389 submissions. The IScIDE papers in this volume are organized in topical sections on machine learning and computational intelligence; pattern recognition; computer vision and image processing; graphics and computer visualization; knowledge discovering, data mining, web mining; multimedia processing and application.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Conference on Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, TAROS 2012 and the 15th Robot World Congress, FIRA 2012, held as joint conference in Bristol, UK, in August 2012. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 25 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers cover various topics in the field of autonomous robotics.

This two volumes set LNAI 8102 and LNAI 8103 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2013, held in Busan, South Korea, in September 2013. The 147 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 184 submissions. The papers discuss various topics from intelligent robotics, automation and mechatronics with particular emphasis on technical challenges associated with varied applications such as biomedical application, industrial automation, surveillance and sustainable mobility.

Implicit definition and description of geometric objects and surfaces plays a critical role in the appearance and manipulation of computer graphics. In addition, the mathematical definition of shapes, using an implicit form, has pivotal applications for geometric modeling, visualization and animation. Until recently, the parametric form has been by far the most popular geometric representation used in computer graphics and computer-aided design. Whereas parametric objects and the techniques associated with them have been exhaustively developed, the implicit form has been used as a complementary geometric representation, mainly in the restricted context of specific applications. However, recent developments in graphics are changing this situation, and the community is beginning to draw its attention to implicit objects. This is reflected in the current research of aspects related to this subject. Employing a coherent conceptual framework, Implicit Objects in Computer Graphics addresses the role of implicitly defined objects in the following parts: mathematical foundations of geometric models, implicit formulations for the specification of shapes, implicit primitives, techniques for constructing and manipulating implicit objects, modeling, rendering and animating implicit objects.

The book is designed for end users in the field of digital imaging, who wish to update their skills and understanding with the latest techniques in image analysis. The book emphasizes the conceptual framework of image analysis and the effective use of image processing tools. It uses applications in a variety of fields to demonstrate and consolidate both specific and general concepts, and to build intuition, insight and understanding. Although the chapters are essentially self-contained they reference other chapters to form an integrated whole. Each chapter employs a pedagogical approach to ensure conceptual learning before introducing specific techniques and "tricks of the trade". The book concentrates on a number of current research applications, and will present a detailed approach to each while emphasizing the applicability of techniques to other problems. The field of topics is wide, ranging from compressive (non-uniform) sampling in MRI, through automated retinal vessel analysis to 3-D ultrasound imaging and more. The book is amply illustrated with figures and applicable medical images. The reader will learn the techniques which experts in the field are currently employing and testing to solve particular research problems, and how they may be applied to other problems.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

A central issue in computer vision is the problem of signal to symbol transformation. In the case of texture, which is an important visual cue, this problem has hitherto received very little attention. This book presents a solution to the signal to symbol transformation problem for texture. The symbolic de- scription scheme consists of a novel taxonomy for textures, and is based on appropriate mathematical models for different kinds of texture. The taxonomy classifies textures into the broad classes of disordered, strongly ordered, weakly ordered and compositional. Disordered textures are described by statistical mea- sures, strongly ordered textures by the placement of primitives, and weakly ordered textures by an orientation field. Compositional textures are created from these three classes of texture by using certain rules of composition. The unifying theme of this book is to provide standardized symbolic descriptions that serve as a descriptive vocabulary for textures. The algorithms developed in the book have been applied to a wide variety of textured images arising in semiconductor wafer inspection, flow visualization and lumber processing. The taxonomy for texture can serve as a scheme for the identification and description of surface flaws and defects occurring in a wide range of practical applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Computational Topology in Image Context, CTIC 2012, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in May 2012. The 16 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They focus on the topology and computation in image context. The workshop is devoted to computational methods using topology for the analysis and comparison of images. The involved research fields comprise computational topology and geometry, discrete topology and geometry, geometrical modeling, algebraic topology for image applications, and any other field involving a geometric-topological approach to image processing.

The two-volume set LNCS 7324/7325 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Image and Recognition, ICIAR 2012, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in June 2012. The 107 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 207 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on clustering and classification; image processing; image analysis; motion analysis and tracking; shape representation; 3D imaging; applications; biometrics and face recognition; human activity recognition; biomedical image analysis; retinal image analysis; and call detection and modeling.

This text reviews the issues involved in handling and processing digital documents. Examining the full range of a document's lifetime, the book covers acquisition, representation, security, pre-processing, layout analysis, understanding, analysis of single components, information extraction, filing, indexing and retrieval. Features: provides a list of acronyms and a glossary of technical terms; contains appendices covering key concepts in machine learning, and providing a case study on building an intelligent system for digital document and library management; discusses issues of security, and legal aspects of digital documents; examines core issues of document image analysis, and image processing techniques of particular relevance to digitized documents; reviews the resources available for natural language processing, in addition to techniques of linguistic analysis for content handling; investigates methods for extracting and retrieving data/information from a document.

The two-volume set LNCS 7951 and 7952 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2013, held in Dalian, China, in July 2013. The 157 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in following topics: computational neuroscience, cognitive science, neural network models, learning algorithms, stability and convergence analysis, kernel methods, large margin methods and SVM, optimization algorithms, varational methods, control, robotics, bioinformatics and biomedical engineering, brain-like systems and brain-computer interfaces, data mining and knowledge discovery and other applications of neural networks.

The development of new-generation micro-manufacturing technologies and systems has revolutionised the way products are designed and manufactured today with a s- nificant impact in a number of key industrial sectors. Micro-manufacturing techno- gies are often described as disruptive, enabling and interdisciplinary leading to the creation of whole new classes of products that were previously not feasible to ma- facture. While key processes for volume manufacture of micro-parts such as mach- ing and moulding are becoming mature technologies, micro-assembly remains a key challenge for the cost-effective manufacture of complex micro-products. The ability to manufacture customizable micro-products that can be delivered in variable volumes within relatively short timescales is very much dependent on the level of development of the micro-assembly processes, positioning, alignment and measurement techniques, gripping and feeding approaches and devices. Micro-assembly has developed rapidly over the last few years and all the pred- tions are that it will remain a critical technology for high-value products in a number of key sectors such as healthcare, communications, defence and aerospace. The key challenge is to match the significant technological developments with a new gene- tion of micro-products that will establish firmly micro-assembly as a mature manuf- turing process. th The book includes the set of papers presented at the 5 International Precision - sembly Seminar IPAS 2010 held in Chamonix, France from the 14th to the 17th February 2010.

The processing of image sequences has a broad spectrum of important applica tions including target tracking, robot navigation, bandwidth compression of TV conferencing video signals, studying the motion of biological cells using microcinematography, cloud tracking, and highway traffic monitoring. Image sequence processing involves a large amount of data. However, because of the progress in computer, LSI, and VLSI technologies, we have now reached a stage when many useful processing tasks can be done in a reasonable amount of time. As a result, research and development activities in image sequence analysis have recently been growing at a rapid pace. An IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Computer Analysis of Time-Varying Imagery was held in Philadelphia, April 5-6, 1979. A related special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Anal ysis and Machine Intelligence was published in November 1980. The IEEE Com puter magazine has also published a special issue on the subject in 1981. The purpose of this book is to survey the field of image sequence analysis and to discuss in depth a number of important selected topics. The seven chap ters fall into two categories. Chapters 2, 3, and 7 are comprehensive surveys on, respectively, the whole field of image sequence analysis, efficient coding of image sequences, and the processing of medical image sequences. In Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6 the authors present mainly results of their own research on, respectively, motion estimation, noise reduction in image sequences, moving object extraction, and occlusion.

The two-volume set LNCS 7324/7325 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Image and Recognition, ICIAR 2012, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in June 2012. The 107 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 207 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on clustering and classification; image processing; image analysis; motion analysis and tracking; shape representation; 3D imaging; applications; biometrics and face recognition; human activity recognition; biomedical image analysis; retinal image analysis; and call detection and modeling.

The 'Fuzzy Logic' research group of the Microelectronics Institute of Seville is composed of researchers who have been doing research on fuzzy logic since the beginning of the 1990s. Mainly, this research has been focused on the microel- tronic design of fuzzy logic-based systems using implementation techniques which range from ASICs to FPGAs and DSPs. Another active line was the development of a CAD environment, named Xfuzzy, to ease such design. Several versions of Xfuzzy have been and are being currently developed by the group. The addressed applications had basically belonged to the control ?eld domain. In this sense, s- eral problems without a linear control solution had been studied thoroughly. Some examples are the navigation control of an autonomous mobile robot and the level control of a dosage system. The research group tackles a new activity with the work developed in this book: the application of fuzzy logic to video and image processing. We addressed our interest to problems related to pixel interpolation, with the aim of adapting such interpolation to the local features of the images. Our hypothesis was that measures and decisions to solve image interpolation, which traditionally had been done in a crisp way, could better be done in a fuzzy way. Validation of this general hypothesis has been done speci?cally in the interpolation problem of video de-interlacing. - interlacing is one of the main tasks in video processing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, ADG 2012, held in Edinburgh, UK, in September 2012. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from the lectures given at the workshop. The conference represents a forum to exchange ideas and views, to present research results and progress, and to demonstrate software tools at the intersection between geometry and automated deduction; the scope of the ADG 2012 moreover has been expanded to cover topics in dynamic geometry.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions IPCAI 2012, held in Pisa, Italy, on June 27, 2012. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers present novel technical concepts, clinical needs and applications as well as hardware, software and systems and their validation. The main technological focus is on patient-specific modeling and its use in interventions, image-guided and robotic surgery, real-time tracking and imaging.

Want to create rich interactive experiences with your artwork, designs, or prototypes, using electronics and programming? This is the place to start. Programming Interactivity helps you explore common themes in interactive art and design, including 2D and 3D graphics, sound, physical interaction, computer vision, geolocation, and more. No programming experience is required to get started. Learn the basics of programming and electronics with this book, and get working code samples you can use right away. You'll also find the background and technical information you need to design, program, build, and troubleshoot your own projects. The second edition brings you up-to-date on the latest versions of these three freely available tools created specifically for artists and designers: * Processing, a Java-based programming language and environment for building projects on the desktop, Web, or mobile phones * Arduino, a system that integrates a microcontroller prototyping board, development environment, and programming language for creating your own sensor and control hardware * openFrameworks, a coding framework for designers and artists that uses the powerful C++ programming language