The two-volume proceedings LNCS 7087 + LNCS 7088 constitute the proceedings of the 5th Pacific Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology, PSIVT 2011, held in Gwangju, Korea, in November 2011. The total of 71 revised papers was carefully reviewed and selected from 168 submissions. The topics covered are: image/video coding and transmission; image/video processing and analysis; imaging and graphics hardware and visualization; image/video retrieval and scene understanding; biomedical image processing and analysis; biometrics and image forensics; and computer vision applications.

Although the computer's life has been relatively short, it has brought about an information revolution that is transforming our world on a scale that is still difficult to comprehend. This digital convergence is shaping society, technology and the media for the next millennium. Areas as diverse as home banking and shopping over the Internet; WWW access over mobile phone networks; and television systems such as Web TV which combine on-line services with television. But convergence is not just about technology. It is also about services and new ways of doing business and of interacting with society. Digital convergence heralds the 'Information Revolution'. Edited by John Vince and Rae Earnshaw this important new book on Digital Convergence: The Information Revolution is an edited volume of papers, bringing together state-of-the-art developments in the Internet and World Wide Web and should be compulsory reading for all those interested in and working in those areas.

In the third paper in this chapter, Mike Pratt provides an historical intro duction to solid modeling. He presents the development of the three most freqently used techniques: cellular subdivision, constructive solid modeling and boundary representation. Although each of these techniques devel oped more or less independently, today the designer's needs dictate that a successful system allows access to all of these methods. For example, sculptured surfaces are generally represented using a boundary represen tation. However, the design of a complex vehicle generally dictates that a sculptured surface representation is most efficient for the 'skin' while constructive solid geometry representation is most efficent for the inter nal mechanism. Pratt also discusses the emerging concept of design by 'feature line'. Finally, he addresses the very important problem of data exchange between solid modeling systems and the progress that is being made towards developing an international standard. With the advent of reasonably low cost scientific workstations with rea sonable to outstanding graphics capabilities, scientists and engineers are increasingly turning to computer analysis for answers to fundamental ques tions and to computer graphics for present~tion of those answers. Although the current crop of workstations exhibit quite impressive computational ca pability, they are still not capable of solving many problems in a reasonable time frame, e. g. , executing computational fluid dynamics and finite element codes or generating complex ray traced or radiosity based images. In the sixth chapter Mike Muuss of the U. S.

Image-based rendering (IBR) refers to a collection of techniques and representations that allow 3D scenes and objects to be visualized in a realistic way without full 3D model reconstruction. IBR uses images as the primary substrate. The potential for photorealistic visualization has tremendous appeal, and it is thus not surprising that IBR has been receiving increasing attention over the years. Applications such as video games, virtual travel, and E-commerce stand to benefit from this technology.

Image-Based Rendering examines the theory, practice, and applications associated with image-based rendering and modeling. The authors bring together their backgrounds and research experiences in computer graphics, computer vision and signal processing to address the multi-disciplinary nature of IBR research. The topics to be covered vary from IBR basic concepts and representations on the theory side, to signal processing and data compression on the practical side. These theoretical and practical issues are further disseminated in several IBR systems built to-date. However, this book will not focus on the geometrical modeling aspect of IBR, since 3D modeling has been extensively treated elsewhere in the vision literature.

One of the only titles devoted exclusively to the area of IBR, this book is intended for researchers, professionals, and general readers interested in the topics of computer graphics, computer vision, image processing, and video processing. Advanced-level students in EECS studying related disciplines will be able to seriously expand their knowledge about image-based rendering.

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. The 5th volume in this series represents a selection of 12 contributions from DMDCM 2010, the 5th International Conference on Digital Media and Digital Content Management, held in Chongqing, China, in December 2010, as well as 9 regular papers. The papers cover topics such as human-computer interaction, virtual exhibit, face recognition, character animation etc.; they moreover present a large number of application examples in the area of e-learning, game, animation, multimedia, and virtual reality which gives more broad view on the application of edutainment-related techniques.

The two-volume set LNCS 6468-6469 contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at the eight workshops that were held in conjunction with the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2010.From a total of 167 submissions to all workshops, 89 papers were selected for publication. The contributions are grouped together according to the main workshops topics, which were: computational photography and aesthetics; computer vision in vehicle technology: from Earth to Mars; electronic cultural heritage; subspace based methods; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; visual surveillance; application of computer vision for mixed and augmented reality.

The two-volume set LNCS 6987 and 6988 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining, WISM 2011, held in Taiyuan, China, in September 2011. The 112 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 472 submissions. The second volume includes 56 papers organized in the following topical sections: management information systems; semantic Web and ontologies; Web content mining; Web information classification; Web information extraction; Web intelligence; Web interfaces and applications; Web services and e-learning; and XML and semi-structured data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Information and Automation, ISIA 2010, held in Guangzhou, China, in November 2010. The 110 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The symposium provides a forum for researchers, educators, engineers, and government officials to present and discuss their latest research results and exchange views on the future research directions in the general areas of Information and Automation.

Pollutants released to the environment are distributed among the many environmental media such as air, water, soil, and vegetation, as the result of complex physical, chemical and biological processes. The possible environmental impact associated with chemical pollutants is related to their concentration levels and persistence in the various environmental compartments. Therefore, information regarding the migration of pollutants across environmental phase boundaries (eg., air-water, soil-water) and their accumulation in the environment is essential if we are to assess the potential environmental impact and the associated risks. In recent years it has become apparent that environmental pollution is a multimedia problem. Risk assessment and the design of appropriate pollution control measures require that we carefully consider the transport and accumulation of pollutants in the environment. We are now recognizing that the environment must be considered as a whole, and the scientific and regulatory approaches must consider the interactions of environmental media. It is also becoming apparent that single-medium approaches are partial and often counter-productive. On the other hand any multimedia program must carefully consider the rate of each environmental medium in the overall multimedia scheme.

Multimedia information systems are quite different from traditional information systems, especially in data types, modeling, delivery, and user interface. The large size of multimedia data and the high bandwidth requirement of multime dia streams require new storage, buffering, delivery, and networking schemes. The presentational nature of multimedia applications requires a proper syn chronization between multimedia streams, and the composition of multimedia documents in the distributed environment should overcome the heterogeneity of underlying systems. This book is edited for undergraduate and graduate students studying mul timedia information and applications, researchers and developers of various multimedia software and hardware systems, multimedia tool developers, user interface designers, and network protocol designers by including 17 chapters focused on the following major issues: * Disk scheduling and storage hierarchy. * Configuration of multimedia servers and buffer management. * Delivery scheduling for multimedia streams. * Supporting user interactions. Document modeling and temporal modeling of multimedia data. * * Integrated multimedia information system.

The primary thesis here is the authors' belief that the emergence of computers as an elemental force in our society must be viewed with a sceptical eye. Crandall and Levich, one a mathematician, the other a philosopher, strive, however, to present a balanced viewpoint, investigating and reflecting on the good and bad sides of this revolution, and seek meaning in this "Information Age". Their examination is stripped of journalistic hyperbole, the cries of self-serving prophets, and the sales pitches of the soft- and hardware industries. In separating the wheat from the chaff, the authors provide readers with a much better understanding of the limitations of these new technologies, along with propositions for their better use and within the societal context.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieval for Audiovisual Data Parsing is an up-to-date overview of audio and video content analysis. Included is extensive treatment of audiovisual data segmentation, indexing and retrieval based on multimodal media content analysis, and content-based management of audio data. In addition to the commonly studied audio types such as speech and music, the authors have included hybrid types of sounds that contain more than one kind of audio component such as speech or environmental sound with music in the background. Emphasis is also placed on semantic-level identification and classification of environmental sounds. The authors introduce a new generic audio retrieval system on top of the audio archiving schemes. Both theoretical analysis and implementation issues are presented. The developing MPEG-7 standards are explored. Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieval for Audiovisual Data Parsing will be especially useful to researchers and graduate level students designing and developing fully functional audiovisual systems for audio/video content parsing of multimedia streams.

Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval 2009 was the sixth event of this - ternational conference series that was initiated in 2003. Since the start, this conference has been co-organized by the University of Aalborg, Esbjerg, D- mark (http: //www. aaue. dk) and the Laboratoire de M ecanique et d'Acoustique inMarseille, France(http: //www. lma. cnrs-mrs. fr)andhastakenplaceinFrance, ItalyandDenmark. The?vepreviouseditionsofCMMRo?eredavariedoverview of recent years' music information retrieval and sound modeling activities in addition to alternative ?elds related to human interaction, perception and c- nition, as well as philosophical aspects linked to the ?eld. We believe that the strength and the originality of this international conference both lie in its mul- disciplinary concept and its ability to permanently evolve and open for new trends and directions within the related ?elds of interest. This year's CMMR took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 18-22, 2009 and was associated with theInternationalConferenceonAuditoryDisplay(http: //www. icad. org), hereby introducing new topics related to sound design, soni?cation and augmented - ality to the computer music modeling and retrieval community."

The two-volume set LNCS 6773-6774 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual and Mixed Reality 2011, held as Part of HCI International 2011, in Orlando, FL, USA, in July 2011, jointly with 10 other conferences addressing the latest research and development efforts and highlighting the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The 43 revised papers included in the first volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: augmented reality applications; virtual and immersive environments; novel interaction devices and techniques in VR; human physiology and behavior in VR environments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design, HAID 2011 held in Kusatsu, Japan, in August 2011. The 13 regular papers and 1 keynote presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on haptic and audio interactions, crossmodal and multimodal communication and emerging multimodal interaction technologies and systems.

The portable device and mobile phone market has witnessed rapid growth in the last few years with the emergence of several revolutionary products such as mobile TV, converging iPhone and digital cameras that combine music, phone and video functionalities into one device. The proliferation of this market has further bene?ted from the competition in software and applications for smart phones such as Google's Android operating system and Apple's iPhone App- Store, stimulating tens of thousands of mobile applications that are made ava- able by individual and enterprise developers. Whereas the mobile device has become ubiquitous in people's daily life not only as a cellular phone but also as a media player, a mobile computing device, and a personal assistant, it is p- ticularly important to address challenges timely in applying advanced pattern recognition, signal, information and multimedia processing techniques, and new emerging networking technologies to such mobile systems. The primary objective of this book is to foster interdisciplinary discussions and research in mobile multimedia processing techniques, applications and s- tems, as well as to provide stimulus to researchers on pushing the frontier of emerging new technologies and applications. One attempt on such discussions was the organization of the First Int- national Workshop of Mobile Multimedia Processing (WMMP 2008), held in Tampa, Florida, USA, on December 7, 2008. About 30 papers were submitted from10countriesacrosstheUSA, Asia andEurope.

This volume brings together, through a peer-revision process, the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication, primarily discussed for the first time at the Second COST 2102 International Training School on "Development of Multimodal Int- faces: Active Listening and Synchrony" held in Dublin, Ireland, March 23-27 2009. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Sci- tific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within the COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" (cost2102.cs.stir.ac.uk) COST Action 2102 in its third year of life brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D interactive virtual world, capable of interacting intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users.

Written by supply chain researchers, consultants, and practitioners, this book explains the newly emerging techniques and practices for highly efficient supply chain management, made possible by the rapid progress in information and communication technologies.

This book presents the state of the art in the areas of ontology evolution and knowledge-driven multimedia information extraction, placing an emphasis on how the two can be combined to bridge the semantic gap. This was also the goal of the EC-sponsored BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction) project, to which the authors of this book have all contributed. The book addresses researchers and practitioners in the field of computer science and more specifically in knowledge representation and management, ontology evolution, and information extraction from multimedia data. It may also constitute an excellent guide to students attending courses within a computer science study program, addressing information processing and extraction from any type of media (text, images, and video). Among other things, the book gives concrete examples of how several of the methods discussed can be applied to athletics (track and field) events.

This book presents research results on data dissemination in mobile networks and peer-to-peer systems for mobile devices. The main focus is a novel resource-sharing mechanism for mobile devices that introduces a new paradigm of information-sharing cooperation among mobile devices not necessarily connected to the internet. The book is geared to the needs of researchers and practitioners in industry, and is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

Parallel and distributed computing is one of the foremost technologies for shaping
future research and development activities in academia and industry. Hyperthreading in Intel processors, hypertransport links in next generation AMD processors, multicore silicon in today's high-end microprocessors, and emerging cluster and grid computing have moved parallel/distributed computing into the mainstream of computing.

New Horizons of Parallel and Distributed Computing is a collection of self-contained chapters written by pioneering researchers to provide solutions for newly emerging problems in this field. This volume will not only provide novel ideas, work in progress and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but will also stimulate future research activities in the area of parallel and distributed computing with applications.

New Horizons of Parallel and Distributed Computing is intended for industry researchers and developers, as well as for academic researchers and advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering. A valuable reference work, it is also suitable as a textbook.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at ECIR 2010, the 32nd Eu- pean Conference on Information Retrieval. The conference was organizedby the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Open University, in co-operation with Dublin City University and the University of Essex, and was supported by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS- IRSG) and the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR). It was held during March 28-31, 2010 in Milton Keynes, UK. ECIR 2010 received a total of 202 full-paper submissions from Continental Europe (40%), UK (14%), North and South America (15%), Asia and Australia (28%), Middle East and Africa (3%). All submitted papers were reviewed by at leastthreemembersoftheinternationalProgramCommittee.Outofthe202- pers 44 were selected asfull researchpapers. ECIR has alwaysbeen a conference with a strong student focus. To allow as much interaction between delegates as possible and to keep in the spirit of the conference we decided to run ECIR 2010 as a single-track event. As a result we decided to have two presentation formats for full papers. Some of them were presented orally, the others in poster format. The presentation format does not represent any di?erence in quality. Instead, the presentation format was decided after the full papers had been accepted at the Program Committee meeting held at the University of Essex. The views of the reviewers were then taken into consideration to select the most appropriate presentation format for each paper.

Access to Mobile Services focuses on methods for accessing broadcast based M-services from multiple wireless channels. This book presents a novel infrastructure that provides a multi-channel broadcast framework for mobile users to effectively discover and access composite M-services. Multi-channel algorithms are proposed for efficiently accessing composite services.

Access to Mobile Services provides an in-depth survey of wireless data access and motivates the need to treat mobile services differently. A wireless adaptation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is also covered.

Designed for researchers and practitioners who work in the general area of mobile services, this book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

Forewords by:
Michael P. Papazoglou, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Fabio Casati, University of Trento, Italy

Even in the age of ubiquitous computing, the importance of the Internet will not change and we still need to solve conventional security issues. In addition, we need to deal with new issues such as security in the P2P environment, privacy issues in the use of smart cards, and RFID systems. Security and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing addresses these issues and more by exploring a wide scope of topics. The volume presents a selection of papers from the proceedings of the 20th IFIP International Information Security Conference held from May 30 to June 1, 2005 in Chiba, Japan. Topics covered include cryptography applications, authentication, privacy and anonymity, DRM and content security, computer forensics, Internet and web security, security in sensor networks, intrusion detection, commercial and industrial security, authorization and access control, information warfare and critical protection infrastructure. These papers represent the most current research in information security, including research funded in part by DARPA and the National Science Foundation.