The book presents findings, views and ideas on what exact problems of image processing, pattern recognition and generation can be efficiently solved by cellular automata architectures. This volume provides a convenient collection in this area, in which publications are otherwise widely scattered throughout the literature. The topics covered include image compression and resizing; skeletonization, erosion and dilation; convex hull computation, edge detection and segmentation; forgery detection and content based retrieval; and pattern generation. The book advances the theory of image processing, pattern recognition and generation as well as the design of efficient algorithms and hardware for parallel image processing and analysis. It is aimed at computer scientists, software programmers, electronic engineers, mathematicians and physicists, and at everyone who studies or develops cellular automaton algorithms and tools for image processing and analysis, or develops novel architectures and implementations of massive parallel computing devices. The book will provide attractive reading for a general audience because it has do-it-yourself appeal: all the computer experiments presented within it can be implemented with minimal knowledge of programming. The simplicity yet substantial functionality of the cellular automaton approach, and the transparency of the algorithms proposed, makes the text ideal supplementary reading for courses on image processing, parallel computing, automata theory and applications.

This book describes how the principle of self-sufficiency can be applied to a reconfigurable modular robotic organism. It shows the design considerations for a novel REPLICATOR robotic platform, both hardware and software, featuring the behavioral characteristics of social insect colonies. Following a comprehensive overview of some of the bio-inspired techniques already available, and of the state-of-the-art in re-configurable modular robotic systems, the book presents a novel power management system with fault-tolerant energy sharing, as well as its implementation in the REPLICATOR robotic modules. In addition, the book discusses, for the first time, the concept of “artificial energy homeostasis� in the context of a modular robotic organism, and shows its verification on a custom-designed simulation framework in different dynamic power distribution and fault tolerance scenarios. This book offers an ideal reference guide for both hardware engineers and software developers involved in the design and implementation of autonomous robotic systems.

This book reveals the historical context and the evolution of the technically complex Allied Signals Intelligence (Sigint) activity against Japan from 1920 to 1945. It traces the all-important genesis and development of the cryptanalytic techniques used to break the main Japanese Navy code (JN-25) and the Japanese Army’s Water Transport Code during WWII. This is the first book to describe, explain and analyze the code breaking techniques developed and used to provide this intelligence, thus closing the sole remaining gap in the published accounts of the Pacific War. The authors also explore the organization of cryptographic teams and issues of security, censorship, and leaks. Correcting gaps in previous research, this book illustrates how Sigint remained crucial to Allied planning throughout the war. It helped direct the advance to the Philippines from New Guinea, the sea battles and the submarine onslaught on merchant shipping. Written by well-known authorities on the history of cryptography and mathematics, Code Breaking in the Pacific is designed for cryptologists, mathematicians and researchers working in communications security. Advanced-level students interested in cryptology, the history of the Pacific War, mathematics or the history of computing will also find this book a valuable resource.

Vehicular communication is a key technology in intelligent transportation systems. For many years now, the academic and industrial research communities have been investigating these communications in order to improve efficiency and safety of future transportation. Vehicular networking offers a wide variety of applications, including safety applications as well as infotainment applications. This book highlights the recent developments in vehicular networking technologies and their interaction with future smart cities in order to promote further research activities and challenges. SAADI BOUDJIT, University of Paris 13, France  HAKIMA CHAOUCHI, Telecom SudParis, France  YACINE GHAMRI, University La Rochelle, France HALABI HASBULLAH, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia ANIS LAOUITI, Telecom SudParis, France  SAOUCENE MAHFOUDH, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia  PAUL MUHLETHALER, INRIA, France AMIR QAYYUM, Mohamad Ali Jinnah University, Pakistan NAUFAL SAAD, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia AHMED SOUA, NIST, USA HAJIME TAZAKI, University of Tokyo, Japan APINUN TUNPAN, Aintec, Thailand WEI WEI, Xi'an University, China RACHID ZAGROUBA, ENSI, Tunisia.

This book examines the context, motivation and current status of biometric systems based on the palmprint, with a specific focus on touchless and less-constrained systems. It covers new technologies in this rapidly evolving field and is one of the first comprehensive books on palmprint recognition systems. It discusses the research literature and the most relevant industrial applications of palmprint biometrics, including the low-cost solutions based on webcams. The steps of biometric recognition are described in detail, including acquisition setups, algorithms, and evaluation procedures. Constraints and limitations of current palmprint recognition systems are analyzed and discussed. The authors also introduce innovative methods for touchless and less-constrained palmprint recognition, with the aim to make palmprint biometrics easier to use in practical, daily-life applications, and overcome the typical constraints and limitations described. Touchless Palmprint Recognition Systems targets professionals and researchers working in biometrics, image processing and three-dimensional reconstruction. Advanced-level students studying biometrics and computer science will also find this material valuable as a secondary text book or reference.

This book provides an overview of the research work on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies carried by the participants of the ARES project. ARES (Advanced Research in Privacy an Security, CSD2007-00004) has been one of the most important research projects funded by the Spanish Government in the fields of computer security and privacy. It is part of the now extinct CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 program, a highly competitive program which aimed to advance knowledge and open new research lines among top Spanish research groups. The project started in 2007 and will finish this 2014. Composed by 6 research groups from 6 different institutions, it has gathered an important number of researchers during its lifetime. Among the work produced by the ARES project, one specific work package has been related to privacy. This books gathers works produced by members of the project related to data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies. The presented works not only summarize important research carried in the project but also serve as an overview of the state of the art in current research on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies.

This book reviews the challenging issues that present barriers to greater implementation of the cloud computing paradigm, together with the latest research into developing potential solutions. Topics and features: presents a focus on the most important issues and limitations of cloud computing, covering cloud security and architecture, QoS and SLAs; discusses a methodology for cloud security management, and proposes a framework for secure data storage and identity management in the cloud; introduces a simulation tool for energy-aware cloud environments, and an efficient congestion control system for data center networks; examines the issues of energy-aware VM consolidation in the IaaS provision, and software-defined networking for cloud related applications; reviews current trends and suggests future developments in virtualization, cloud security, QoS data warehouses, cloud federation approaches, and DBaaS provision; predicts how the next generation of utility computing infrastructures will be designed.

Based on a rigorous selection of submissions to The 29th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2014),  this books includes some of the most recent ideas and technical results in computer systems, computer science, and computer-communication networks. It offers the reader a timely access to innovative research and advances in computing and communications from many different areas of the world.   The topics covered include (but are not limited to) computer architectures and digital systems, algorithms, theory, software engineering, data engineering, computational intelligence, system security, computer systems and networks, performance modeling and analysis, distributed and parallel systems, bioinformatics, computer vision and significant applications such as medical informatics and imaging.   The 29th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 2014) took place in Krakow Old City, Poland on October, 27–8, 2014.

This book discusses how to combine type-2 fuzzy sets and graphical models to solve a range of real-world pattern recognition problems such as speech recognition, handwritten Chinese character recognition, topic modeling as well as human action recognition. It covers these recent developments while also providing a comprehensive introduction to the fields of type-2 fuzzy sets and graphical models. Though primarily intended for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in fuzzy logic and pattern recognition, the book can also serve as a valuable reference work for researchers without any previous knowledge of these fields. Dr. Jia Zeng is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, China. Dr. Zhi-Qiang Liu is a Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, China.

This highly practical and self-contained guidebook explains the principles and major applications of digital hologram recording and numerical reconstruction (Digital Holography). A special chapter is designated to digital holographic interferometry with applications in deformation and shape measurement and refractive index determination. Applications in imaging and microscopy are also described. Spcial techniques such as digital light-in-flight holography, holographic endoscopy, information encrypting, comparative holography, and related techniques of speckle metrology are also treated

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances  organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality� of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

This book brings together geometric tools and their applications for Information analysis. It collects current and many uses of in the interdisciplinary fields of Information Geometry Manifolds in Advanced Signal, Image & Video Processing, Complex Data Modeling and Analysis, Information Ranking and Retrieval, Coding, Cognitive Systems, Optimal Control, Statistics on Manifolds, Machine Learning, Speech/sound recognition and natural language treatment which are also substantially relevant for the industry.

This book introduces new trends of theory and practice of information technologies in tourism. The book does not handle only the fundamental contribution, but also discusses innovative and emerging technologies to promote and develop new generation tourism informatics theory and their applications. Some chapters are concerned with data analysis, web technologies, social media and their case studies. Travel information on the web provided by travelers is very useful for other travelers make their travel plan. A chapter in this book proposes a method for interactive retrieval of information on accommodation facilities to support travelling customers in their travel preparations. Also an adaptive user interface for personalized transportation guidance system is proposed. Another chapter in this book shows a novel support system for the collaborative tourism planning by using the case reports that are collected via Internet. Also, a system for recommending hotels for the users is proposed and evaluated. Other chapters are concerned with recommendation, personalization and other emerging technologies.

This book illustrates how Interactive Systems can help elderly and disabled populations engage with the world around them by finding methods of overcoming the difficulties these communities face when using such systems by presenting the latest in state-of-the-art technology and providing a vision for accessibility for the near future. The challenges faced by accessibility practitioners are discussed and the different phases of delivering accessible products and services are explored. A collection of eminent researchers from around the world cover topics on developing and standardizing user models for inclusive design, adaptable multimodal system development for digital TV and ubiquitous devices, presenting research on intelligent voice recognition, adaptable pointing, browsing and navigation, and affect and gesture recognition. The research not only focuses on how these can be hugely beneficial to primary users, but often finding useful applications for their able-bodied counterparts. For this new edition, new chapters have been added focusing on the latest developments in games for the visually impaired, inclusive interfaces for  the agricultural industry in India and technologies to improve accessibility in broadcasting in Japan. A Multimodal End-2-End Approach to Accessible Computing will be an invaluable resource for both researchers and practitioners alike.  

This book examines the signal processing perspective in haptic teleoperation systems. This text covers the topics of prediction, estimation, architecture, data compression and error correction that can be applied to haptic teleoperation systems. The authors begin with an overview of haptic teleoperation systems, then look at a Bayesian approach to haptic teleoperation systems. They move onto a discussion of haptic data compression, haptic data digitization and forward error correction.

This book addresses topics of mobile multi-agent systems, pattern formation, biological modelling, artificial life, unconventional computation, and robotics. The behaviour of a simple organism which is capable of remarkable biological and computational feats that seem to transcend its simple component parts is examined and modelled. In this book the following question is asked: How can something as simple as Physarum polycephalum - a giant amoeboid single-celled organism which does not possess any neural tissue, fixed skeleton or organised musculature - can approximate complex computational behaviour during its foraging, growth and adaptation of its amorphous body plan, and with such limited resources? To answer this question the same apparent limitations as faced by the organism are applied: using only simple components with local interactions. A synthesis approach is adopted and a mobile multi-agent system with very simple individual behaviours is employed. It is shown their interactions yield emergent behaviour showing complex self-organised pattern formation with material-like evolution. The presented model reproduces the biological behaviour of Physarum; the formation, growth and minimisation of transport networks. In its conclusion the book moves beyond Physarum and provides results of scoping experiments approximating other complex systems using the multi-agent approach. The results of this book demonstrate the power and range of harnessing emergent phenomena arising in simple multi-agent systems for biological modelling, computation and soft-robotics applications. It methodically describes the necessary components and their interactions, showing how deceptively simple components can create powerful mechanisms, aided by abundant illustrations, supplementary recordings and interactive models. It will be of interest to those in biological sciences, physics, computer science and robotics who wish to understand how simple components can result in complex and useful behaviours and who wish explore the potential of guided pattern formation themselves.

The new multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains. This book aims to provide a complete coverage of the areas outlined and to bring together the researchers from academic and industry as well as practitioners to share ideas, challenges, and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of this field.

“Autonomous manipulation� is a challenge in robotic technologies. It refers to the capability of a mobile robot system with one or more manipulators that performs intervention tasks requiring physical contacts in unstructured environments and without continuous human supervision. Achieving autonomous manipulation capability is a quantum leap in robotic technologies as it is currently beyond the state of the art in robotics. This book addresses issues with the complexity of the problems encountered in autonomous manipulation including representation and modeling of robotic structures, kinematic and dynamic robotic control, kinematic and algorithmic singularity avoidance, dynamic task priority, workspace optimization and environment perception. Further development in autonomous manipulation should be able to provide robust improvements of the solutions for all of the above issues. The book provides an extensive tract on sensory-based autonomous manipulation for intervention tasks in unstructured environments. After presenting the theoretical foundations for kinematic and dynamic modelling as well as task-priority based kinematic control of multi-body systems, the work is focused on one of the most advanced underwater vehicle-manipulator system, SAUVIM (Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions). Solutions to the problem of target identification and localization are proposed, a number of significant case studies are discussed and practical examples an d experimental/simulation results are presented. The book may inspire the robot research community to further investigate critical issues in autonomous manipulation and to develop robot systems that can profoundly impact our society for the better.

In recent years, ELM has emerged as a revolutionary technique of computational intelligence, and has attracted considerable attentions. An extreme learning machine (ELM) is a single layer feed-forward neural network alike learning system, whose connections from the input layer to the hidden layer are randomly generated, while the connections from the hidden layer to the output layer are learned through linear learning methods. The outstanding merits of extreme learning machine (ELM) are its fast learning speed, trivial human intervene and high scalability. This book contains some selected papers from the International Conference on Extreme Learning Machine 2013, which was held in Beijing China, October 15-17, 2013. This conference aims to bring together the researchers and practitioners of extreme learning machine from a variety of fields including artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering and bioinformatics, system modelling and control, and signal and image processing, to promote research and discussions of “learning without iterative tuning". This book covers algorithms and applications of ELM. It gives readers a glance of the newest developments of ELM.

Providing a comprehensive introduction into an overview of the field of pervasive healthcare applications, this volume incorporates a variety of timely topics ranging from medical sensors and hardware infrastructures, to software platforms and applications and addresses issues of user experience and technology acceptance. The recent developments in the area of information and communication technologies have laid the groundwork for new patient-centred healthcare solutions. While the majority of computer-supported healthcare tools designed in the last decades focused mainly on supporting care-givers and medical personnel, this trend changed with the introduction of pervasive healthcare technologies, which provide supportive and adaptive services for a broad variety and diverse set of end users. With contributions from key researchers the book integrates the various aspects of pervasive healthcare systems including application design, hardware development, system implementation, hardware and software infrastructures as well as end-user aspects providing an excellent overview of this important and evolving field.

Modern image processing techniques are based on multiresolution geometrical methods of image representation. These methods are efficient in sparse approximation of digital images. There is a wide family of functions called simply ‘X-lets’, and these methods can be divided into two groups: the adaptive and the nonadaptive. This book is devoted to the adaptive methods of image approximation, especially to multismoothlets. Besides multismoothlets, several other new ideas are also covered. Current literature considers the black and white images with smooth horizon function as the model for sparse approximation but here, the class of blurred multihorizon is introduced, which is then used in the approximation of images with multiedges. Additionally, the semi-anisotropic model of multiedge representation, the introduction of the shift invariant multismoothlet transform and sliding multismoothlets are also covered. Geometrical Multiresolution Adaptive Transforms should be accessible to both mathematicians and computer scientists. It is suitable as a professional reference for students, researchers and engineers, containing many open problems and will be an excellent starting point for those who are beginning new research in the area or who want to use geometrical multiresolution adaptive methods in image processing, analysis or compression.

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.

With the proliferation of social media and on-line communities in networked world a large gamut of data has been collected and stored in databases. The rate at which such data is stored is growing at a phenomenal rate and pushing the classical methods of data analysis to their limits. This book presents an integrated framework of recent empirical and theoretical research on social network analysis based on a wide range of techniques from various disciplines like data mining, social sciences, mathematics, statistics, physics, network science, machine learning with visualization techniques and security. The book illustrates the potential of multi-disciplinary techniques in various real life problems and intends to motivate researchers in social network analysis to design more effective tools by integrating swarm intelligence and data mining.

This book captures the state of the art in cloud technologies, infrastructures, and service delivery and deployment models. The work provides guidance and case studies on the development of cloud-based services and infrastructures from an international selection of expert researchers and practitioners. Features: presents a focus on security and access control mechanisms for cloud environments, analyses standards and brokerage services, and investigates the role of certification for cloud adoption; evaluates cloud ERP, suggests a framework for implementing “big data� science, and proposes an approach for cloud interoperability; reviews existing elasticity management solutions, discusses the relationship between cloud management and governance, and describes the development of a cloud service capability assessment model; examines cloud applications in higher education, including the use of knowledge-as-a-service in the provision of education, and cloud-based e-learning for students with disabilities.

The book is mainly addressed to young graduate students in engineering and natural sciences who start to face numerical simulation, either at a research level or in the field of industrial applications. The main subjects covered are: Biomechanics, Stochastic Calculus, Geophysical flow simulation and Shock-Capturing numerical methods for Hyperbolic Systems of Partial Differential Equations. The book can also be useful to researchers or even technicians working at an industrial environment, who are interested in the state-of-the-art numerical techniques in these fields. Moreover, it gives an overview of the research developed at the French and Spanish universities and in some European scientific institutions. This book can be also useful as a textbook at master courses in Mathematics, Physics or Engineering.