This two volume 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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2013, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in October 2013. The 13 full papers, 6 short papers, 11 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. In addition to these papers, the program featured 2 demos, 3 workshops, 3 tutorials and 3 art installations, also summarized in this book. The papers cover various topics in the multi-disciplinary field of entertainment computing.

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 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.

The two volume set LNCS 7431 and 7432 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2012, held in Rethymnon, Crete, Greece, in July 2012. The 68 revised full papers and 35 poster papers presented together with 45 special track papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 200 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: Part I (LNCS 7431) comprises computational bioimaging; computer graphics; calibration and 3D vision; object recognition; illumination, modeling, and segmentation; visualization; 3D mapping, modeling and surface reconstruction; motion and tracking; optimization for vision, graphics, and medical imaging, HCI and recognition. Part II (LNCS 7432) comprises topics such as unconstrained biometrics: advances and trends; intelligent environments: algorithms and applications; applications; virtual reality; face processing and recognition.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing, CASC 2013, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2013. The 33 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book.

The papers address issues such as polynomial algebra; the solution of tropical linear systems and tropical polynomial systems; the theory of matrices; the use of computer algebra for the investigation of various mathematical and applied topics related to ordinary differential equations (ODEs); applications of symbolic computations for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in mathematical physics; problems arising at the application of computer algebra methods for finding infinitesimal symmetries; applications of symbolic and symbolic-numeric algorithms in mechanics and physics; automatic differentiation; the application of the CAS Mathematica for the simulation of quantum error correction in quantum computing; the application of the CAS GAP for the enumeration of Schur rings over the group A5; constructive computation of zero separation bounds for arithmetic expressions; the parallel implementation of fast Fourier transforms with the aid of the Spiral library generation system; the use of object-oriented languages such as Java or Scala for implementation of categories as type classes; a survey of industrial applications of approximate computer algebra.

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.

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 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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Machine Learning in Medical Imaging, MLMI 2013, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2013, in Nagoya, Japan, in September 2013. The 32 contributions included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. They focus on major trends and challenges in the area of machine learning in medical imaging and aim to identify new cutting-edge techniques and their use in medical imaging.

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.

Mobile robots are playing an increasingly important role in our world. Remotely operated vehicles are in everyday use for hazardous tasks such as charting and cleaning up hazardous waste spills, construction work of tunnels and high rise buildings, and underwater inspection of oil drilling platforms in the ocean. A whole host of further applications, however, beckons robots capable of autonomous operation without or with very little intervention of human operators. Such robots of the future will explore distant planets, map the ocean floor, study the flow of pollutants and carbon dioxide through our atmosphere and oceans, work in underground mines, and perform other jobs we cannot even imagine; perhaps even drive our cars and walk our dogs. The biggest technical obstacles to building mobile robots are vision and navigation-enabling a robot to see the world around it, to plan and follow a safe path through its environment, and to execute its tasks. At the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, we are studying those problems both in isolation and by building complete systems. Since 1980, we have developed a series of small indoor mobile robots, some experimental, and others for practical applicationr Our outdoor autonomous mobile robot research started in 1984, navigating through the campus sidewalk network using a small outdoor vehicle called the Terregator. In 1985, with the advent of DARPA's Autonomous Land Vehicle Project, we constructed a computer controlled van with onboard sensors and researchers. In the fall of 1987, we began the development of a six-legged Planetary Rover.

In order to rea1ize real-time medica1 imaging systems, such as are used for computed tomography, automated miscroscopy, dynamic radioisotope imaging, etc., special techno1ogy is required. The high-speed image sour ce must be successfu11y married with the u1tra- high-speed computer. Usua11y the ordinary genera1-purpose computer is found to be inadequate to the image generation and/or image pro- cessing task. The ordinary computer executes instructions at be- tween 1 and 10 million per second. Speed has improved by only about a factor of 10 during the past 20 years. In contrast a typical com- puter used in recognizing blood cell images at 10,000 per hour must execute instructions at between 1 billion and 10 billion per second. Simi1ar execution rates are required to construct a computed tomogra- phy image in real-time (1 to 10 seconds). For the reasons given above, engineering development in image generation and processing in the field of biomedicine has become a discipline unto itself; a discipline wherein the computer engineer is driven to design extremely high-speed machines that far surpass the ordinary computer and the x-ray, radioisotope, or microscope scanner designer must also produce equipment whose specifications extend far beyond the state-of-the-art.

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.

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

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 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 '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 refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, AIS 2012, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in June 2012, collocated with the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, IACIAR 2012. The 31 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomous sensors and sensor systems, autonomous systems and intelligent control with applications, intelligent fuzzy systems, intelligent robotics, intelligent knowledge management, swarm and evolutionary methods, and applications

Rapid development of remote sensing technology in recent years has greatly increased availability of high-resolution satellite image data. However, detailed analysis of such large data sets also requires innovative new techniques in image and signal processing.

This important text/reference presents a comprehensive review of image processing methods, for the analysis of land use in residential areas. Combining a theoretical framework with highly practical applications, making use of both well-known methods and cutting-edge techniques in computer vision, the book describes a system for the effective detection of single houses and streets in very high resolution.

Topics and features: with a Foreword by Prof. Dr. Peter Reinartz of the German Aerospace Center; provides end-of-chapter summaries and review questions; presents a detailed review on remote sensing satellites; examines the multispectral information that can be obtained from satellite images, with a focus on vegetation and shadow-water indices; investigates methods for land-use classification, introducing precise graph theoretical measures over panchromatic images; addresses the problem of detecting residential regions; describes a house and street network-detection subsystem; concludes with a summary of the key ideas covered in the book.

This pioneering work on automated satellite and aerial image-understanding systems will be of great interest to researchers in both remote sensing and computer vision, highlighting the benefit of interdisciplinary collaboration between the two communities. Urban planners and policy makers will also find considerable value in the proposed system."

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.

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

This book introduces the statistical software R to the image processing community in an intuitive and practical manner. R brings interesting statistical and graphical tools which are important and necessary for image processing techniques. Furthermore, it has been proved in the literature that R is among the most reliable, accurate and portable statistical software available. Both the theory and practice of R code concepts and techniques are presented and explained, and the reader is encouraged to try their own implementation to develop faster, optimized programs. Those who are new to the field of image processing and to R software will find this work a useful introduction. By reading the book alongside an active R session, the reader will experience an exciting journey of learning and programming.

This book is the fruit of a very long and elaborate process. It was conceived as a comprehensive solution to several deficiencies encountered while trying to teach the essentials of Computer Vision in different contexts: to technicians from industry looking for technological solutions to some of their problems, to students in search of a good subject for a PhD thesis, and to researchers in other fields who believe that Computer Vision techniques may help them to analyse their results. The book was carefully planned with all these people in mind. Thus, it covers the fundamentals of both 2D and 3D Computer Vision and their most widespread industrial applications, such as automated inspection, robot guidance and workpiece acquisition. The level of explanation is that of an expanded introductory text, in the sense that, besides the basic material, some special advanced topics are included in each chapter, together with an extensive bibliography for experts to follow up. Well-known researchers on each of the topics were appointed to write a chapter following several guidelines to ensure a consistent presentation throughout. I would like to thank the authors for their patience, because some of them had to go through several revisions of their chapters in order to avoid repetition and to improve the homogeneity and coherence of the book. I hope they will find that the final result has been worth their efforts.

During the past two decades there has been a considerable growth in interest in problems of pattern recognition and image processing (PRIP). This inter est has created an increasing need for methods and techniques for the design of PRIP systems. PRIP involves analysis, classification and interpretation of data. Practical applications of PRIP include character recognition, re mote sensing, analysis of medical signals and images, fingerprint and face identification, target recognition and speech understanding. One difficulty in making PRIP systems practically feasible, and hence, more popularly used, is the requirement of computer time and storage. This situation is particularly serious when the patterns to be analyzed are quite complex. Thus it is of the utmost importance to investigate special comput er architectures and their implementations for PRIP. Since the advent of VLSI technology, it is possible to put thousands of components on one chip. This reduces the cost of processors and increases the processing speed. VLSI algorithms and their implementations have been recently developed for PRIP. This book is intended to document the recent major progress in VLSI system design for PRIP applications."