Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc. This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.

Multimedia Content Analysis: Theory and Applications covers the latest in multimedia content analysis and applications based on such analysis. As research has progressed, it has become clear that this field has to appeal to other disciplines such as psycho-physics, media production, etc. This book consists of invited chapters that cover the entire range of the field. Some of the topics covered include low-level audio-visual analysis based retrieval and indexing techniques, the TRECVID effort, video browsing interfaces, content creation and content analysis, and multimedia analysis-based applications, among others. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the multimedia field.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyzing image sequences, or video Video understanding deals with understanding of video understanding. sequences, e.g., recognition of gestures, activities, facial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvi ous overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to generate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Re searchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to generate the synthetic imagery. A good exam pIe of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is derived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analy sis followed by synthesis. Image processing has always overlapped with computer vision because they both inherently work directly with images."

This book is the first in aseries on novellow power design architectures, methods and design practices. It results from of a large European project started in 1997, whose goal is to promote the further development and the faster and wider industrial use of advanced design methods for reducing the power consumption of electronic systems. Low power design became crucial with the wide spread of portable information and cornrnunication terminals, where a small battery has to last for a long period. High performance electronics, in addition, suffers from a permanent increase of the dissipated power per square millimetre of silicon, due to the increasing eIock-rates, which causes cooling and reliability problems or otherwise limits the performance. The European Union's Information Technologies Programme 'Esprit' did there fore launch a 'Pilot action for Low Power Design', wh ich eventually grew to 19 R&D projects and one coordination project, with an overall budget of 14 million Euro. It is meanwhile known as European Low Power Initiative for Electronic System Design (ESD-LPD) and will be completed by the end of 2001. It involves 30 major Euro pean companies and 20 well-known institutes. The R&D projects aims to develop or demonstrate new design methods for power reduction, while the coordination project takes care that the methods, experiences and results are properly documented and pub licised."

Intelligent Multimedia Multi-Agent Systems focuses on building intelligent successful systems. The book adopts a human-centered approach and considers various pragmatic issues and problems in areas like intelligent systems, software engineering, multimedia databases, electronic commerce, data mining, enterprise modeling and human-computer interaction for developing a human-centered virtual machine. The authors describe an ontology of the human-centered virtual machine which includes four components: activity-centered analysis component, problem solving adapter component, transformation agent component, and multimedia based interpretation component. These four components capture the external and internal planes of the system development spectrum. They integrate the physical, social and organizational reality on the external plane with stakeholder goals, tasks and incentives, and organization culture on the internal plane. The human-centered virtual machine and its four components are used for developing intelligent multimedia multi-agent systems in areas like medical decision support and health informatics, medical image retrieval, e-commerce, face detection and annotation, internet games and sales recruitment. The applications in these areas help to expound various aspects of the human-centered virtual machine including, human-centered domain modeling, distributed intelligence and communication, perceptual and cognitive task modeling, component based software development, and multimedia based data modeling. Further, the applications described in the book employ various intelligent technologies like neural networks, fuzzy logic and knowledge based systems, software engineering artifacts like agents and objects, internet technologies like XML and multimedia artifacts like image, audio, video and text.

From the foreword by Thomas Huang:
"During the past decade, researchers in computer vision have found that probabilistic machine learning methods are extremely powerful. This book describes some of these methods. In addition to the Maximum Likelihood framework, Bayesian Networks, and Hidden Markov models are also used. Three aspects are stressed: features, similarity metric, and models. Many interesting and important new results, based on research by the authors and their collaborators, are presented.

Although this book contains many new results, it is written in a style that suits both experts and novices in computer vision."

With the rapidly increasing penetration of laptop computers and mobile phones, which are primarily used by mobile users to access Internet s- vices like e-mail and World Wide Web (WWW) access, support of Internet services in a mobile environment is an emerging requirement. Wireless n- works have been used for communication among fully distributed users in a multimedia environment that has the needs to provide real-time bursty traffic (such as voice or video) and data traffic with excellent reliability and service quality. To satisfy the huge wireless multimedia service demand and improve the system performance, efficient channel access methods and analytical methods must be provided. In this way very accurate models, that faithfully reproduce the stochastic behavior of multimedia wireless communication and computer networks, can be constructed. Most of these system models are discrete-time queueing systems. Queueing networks and Markov chains are commonly used for the p- formance and reliability evaluation of computer, communication, and m- ufacturing systems. Although there are quite a few books on the individual topics of queueing networks and Markov chains, we have found none that covers the topics of discrete-time and continuous-time multichannel mul- traffic queueing networks. On the other hand, the design and development of multichannel mul- hop network systems and interconnected network systems or integrated n- works of multimedia traffic require not only such average performance m- sures as the throughput or packet delay but also higher moments of traffic departures and transmission delay.

One of the most intriguing problems in video processing is the removal of the redundancy or the compression of a video signal. There are a large number of applications which depend on video compression. Data compression represents the enabling technology behind the multimedia and digital television revolution. In motion compensated lossy video compression the original video sequence is first split into three new sources of information, segmentation, motion and residual error. These three information sources are then quantized, leading to a reduced rate for their representation but also to a distorted reconstructed video sequence. After the decomposition of the original source into segmentation, mo tion and residual error information is decided, the key remaining problem is the allocation of the available bits into these three sources of information. In this monograph a theory is developed which provides a solution to this fundamental bit allocation problem. It can be applied to all quad-tree-based motion com pensated video coders which use a first order differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) scheme for the encoding of the displacement vector field (DVF) and a block-based transform scheme for the encoding of the displaced frame differ ence (DFD). An optimal motion estimator which results in the smallest DFD energy for a given bit rate for the encoding of the DVF is also a result of this theory. Such a motion estimator is used to formulate a motion compensated interpolation scheme which incorporates a global smoothness constraint for the DVF."

In many applications, e.g., bioinformatics, web access traces, system u- lization logs, etc., the data is naturally in the form of sequences. It has been of great interests to analyze the sequential data to find their inherent char- teristics. The sequential pattern is one of the most widely studied models to capture such characteristics. Examples of sequential patterns include but are not limited to protein sequence motifs and web page navigation traces. In this book, we focus on sequential pattern mining. To meet different needs of various applications, several models of sequential patterns have been proposed. We do not only study the mathematical definitions and application domains of these models, but also the algorithms on how to effectively and efficiently find these patterns. The objective of this book is to provide computer scientists and domain - perts such as life scientists with a set of tools in analyzing and understanding the nature of various sequences by : (1) identifying the specific model(s) of - quential patterns that are most suitable, and (2) providing an efficient algorithm for mining these patterns. Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Data Mining is the process of extracting implicit knowledge and discovery of interesting characteristics and patterns that are not explicitly represented in the databases. The techniques can play an important role in understanding data and in capturing intrinsic relationships among data instances. Data mining has been an active research area in the past decade and has been proved to be very useful.

Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording provides an integral, in-depth and up-to-date overview of the signal processing techniques that are at the heart of digital baseband transmission and recording systems. The coverage ranges from fundamentals to applications in such areas as digital subscriber loops and magnetic and optical storage. Much of the material presented here has never before appeared in book form. The main features of Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording include: a survey of digital subscriber lines and digital magnetic and optical storage; a review of fundamental transmission and reception limits; an encyclopedic introduction to baseband modulation codes; development of a rich palette of equalization techniques; a coherent treatment of Viterbi detection and many near-optimum detection schemes; an overview of adaptive reception techniques that encompasses adaptive gain and slope control, adaptive detection, and novel forms of zero-forcing adaptation; an in-depth review of timing recovery and PLLs, with an extensive catalog of timing-recovery schemes. . Featuring around 450 figures, 200 examples, 350 problems and exercises, and 750 references, Digital Baseband Transmission and Recording is an essential reference source to engineers and researchers active in telecommunications and digital recording. It will also be useful for advanced courses in digital communications.

In the present digital revolution we often seem trapped in a Kafkaesque world of technological advances, some desired, some disliked or even feared, which we cannot influence but must accept. This book discusses the urgent need to redress this situation. The authors argue that technologies succeed or fail according to their relevance and value to people, who need to be actively engaged in order to create shared visions and influence their implementation.

This is an edited volume, written by well-recognized international researchers with extended chapter style versions of the best papers presented at the SITIS 2006 International Conference. This book presents the state-of-the-art and recent research results on the application of advanced signal processing techniques for improving the value of image and video data. It introduces new results on video coding on time-honored topic of securing image information. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. This book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

CMMR is an annual event focusing on important aspects of computer music. CMMR 2008 was the ?fth event in this series and was co-organized by A- borg University Esbjerg, Denmark (http://www.aaue.dk), the Laboratoire de M' ecanique et d'Acoustique, CNRS in Marseille, France (http:/www.lma.cn- mrs.fr) and the Network for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning, University of Southern Denmark (http://www.ntsmb.dk/). The conference was held in Copenhagen, May 19-23, 2008. The four previous editions of CMMR gathered a large number of notew- thy papers by researchers from the ?eld of computer music. The proceedings of these conferences were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS 2771, LNCS 3310, LNCS 3902 and LNCS 4969). The present e- tion follows the lineage of the previous ones, including a collection of 21 papers specially reviewed and corrected for this proceedings volume. The ?eld of computer music embraces a large number of research areas that span from information retrieval, programming, arti?cial intelligence to aco- tics, signal processing and sound modeling. In the last CMMR gatherings an increased emphasis was placed on the role of human interaction at all levels of musicalpractice,aswellasperceptualandcognitiveaspects inorderto establish relationsbetweenthestructureofsoundsandtheirimpactonhumanbeings.The identi?cation of perceptually relevant sound structures is linked to the notion of the sense of sounds, which was the title of the CMMR 2007 conference.

Motion-Free Super-Resolution is a compilation of very recent work on various methods of generating super-resolution (SR) images from a set of low-resolution images. The current literature on this topic deals primarily with the use of motion cues for the purpose of generating SR images. These cues have, it is shown, their advantages and disadvantages. In contrast, this book shows that cues other than motion can also be used for the same purpose, and addresses both the merits and demerits of these new techniques.

Motion-Free Super-Resolution supersedes much of the lead author 's previous edited volume, "Super-Resolution Imaging," and includes an up-to-date account of the latest research efforts in this fast-moving field. This sequel also features a style of presentation closer to that of a textbook, with an emphasis on teaching and explanation rather than scholarly presentation.

In recent decades Multimedia processing has emerged as an important technology to generate content based on images, video, audio, graphics, and text. This book is a compilation of the latest trends and developments in the field of computational intelligence in multimedia processing. The edited book presents a large number of interesting applications to intelligent multimedia processing of various Computational Intelligence techniques including neural networks and fuzzy logic.

For the first time, a comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters. The text introduces toolkits for authoring animated characters which further supports the practicality and ease of use of this new interface technology. As life-like characters is a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. The text covers the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

This volume emphasizes the applications and implications of the Geospatial Web and the role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society. There is a clear focus on applied geospatial aspects. The book has contributions from a very active research community. Containing chapters from renowned researchers and practitioners, this volume will be invaluable to all interested in this field.

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser's dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication.

This book comprises a variety of breakthroughs and recent advances on Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) intended for both researchers and practitioners. Topics addressed here can be of interest for those people searching for last trends involving such a growing discipline. Important issues concerning this book includes cutti- edge topics such as Semantic Web Interfaces, Natural Language Processing and - bile Interaction, as well as new methodological trends such as Interface-Engineering techniques, User-Centred Design, Usability, Accessibility, Development Meth- ologiesandEmotionalUserInterfaces. Theideabehindthisbookistobringtogether relevant and novel research on diverse interaction paradigms. New trends are gu- anteedaccordingtothedemandingclaimsofbothHCIresearchersandpractitioners, which encourage the explicit arrangement of new industrial and technological topics such as the previously cited Interfaces for the Semantic Web, and Mobile Interfaces, but also Multimodal Interaction, Collaborative Interfaces, End-User Development, Usability and User Interface Engineering. Chapters included in this book comprise a selection of top high-quality papers from Interaccion 2007, which is the most important HCI conference sponsored by AIPO (the Spanish HCI Association). Papers were selected from a ranking - tained through double-blind peer review and later meta-review processes, cons- ering the best evaluated paper from both the review and presentation session. Such a paper selection constitutes only 33% of the papers published in the conference proceedings. We would like to thank the reviewers for their effort in revising the chapters included in this publication, namely Silvia T. Acuna, ~ Sandra Baldasarri, Crescencio Bravo, Cesar A.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research from a wide area of subjects brought about by the digital convergence of computing, television, telecommunications and the World-Wide Web. It represents a unique snapshot of trends across a wide range of subjects including virtual environments; virtual reality; telepresence; human-computer interface design; interactivity; avatars; and the Internet. Both researchers and practitioners will find it an invaluable source of reference.

"Convergence" is defined as the intertwinement of species or technologies. "Tech- logical convergence," on the other hand, refers to a trend where a single product such as a cell phone, used in the past solely for communication, evolves into a product that functions not only as a communication device but incorporates the distinct function- ities of a number of other technologies, thereby enabling users to take pictures, listen to music, access the Web, send and receive e-mail messages, find their way, and so on, equally successfully. Social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn, where users congregate, discuss certain issues, entertain themselves, and share information in t- tual, audio and video formats, are among the most frequented web sites. Social networks having Web 2. 0 features offer personalized services, allowing users to - corporate their own content easily and describe, organize and share it with others, thereby enriching users' experience. More often than not, a capable cell phone is all you need to get access to such social networks and carry out all those tasks. Such tools tend to change our private, social and professional lives and blur the boundaries among them. In other words, our private, social and professional lives are converging, too: someone using a cell phone could be communicating with his/her friend(s), accessing information services, taking an exam using a learning management system, or conducting business.

This volume on virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and gamification for cultural heritage offers an insightful introduction to the theories, development, recent applications and trends of the enabling technologies for mixed reality and gamified interaction in cultural heritage and creative industries in general. It has two main goals: serving as an introductory textbook to train beginning and experienced researchers in the field of interactive digital cultural heritage, and offering a novel platform for researchers in and across the culturally-related disciplines. To this end, it is divided into two sections following a pedagogical model developed by the focus group of the first EU Marie S. Curie Fellowship Initial Training Network on Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH): Section I describes recent advances in mixed reality enabling technologies, while section II presents the latest findings on interaction with 3D tangible and intangible digital cultural heritage. The sections include selected contributions from some of the most respected scholars, researchers and professionals in the fields of VR/AR, gamification, and digital heritage. This book is intended for all heritage professionals, researchers, lecturers and students who wish to explore the latest mixed reality and gamification technologies in the context of cultural heritage and creative industries. It pursues a pedagogic approach based on trainings, conferences, workshops and summer schools that the ITN-DCH fellows have been following in order to learn how to design next-generation virtual heritage applications, systems and services.

Welcome to the Proceedings of ICCHP 2010! We were proud to welcome participants from more than 40 countries from all over the world to this year's ICCHP. Since the late 1980s, it has been ICCHP's mission to support and reflect development in the field of "Assistive Technologies," eAccessibility and eInclusion. With a focus on scientific quality, ICCHP has become an important reference in our field. The 2010 conference and this collection of papers once again fulfilled this mission. The International Programme Committee, comprising 106 experts from all over the world, selected 147 full and 44 short papers out of 328 abstracts submitted to ICCHP. This acceptance ratio of about half of the submissions demonstrates our strict pursuit of scientific quality both of the programme and in particular of the proceedings in your hands. An impressive number of experts agreed to organize "Special Thematic Sessions" (STS) for ICCHP 2010. These STS help to bring the meeting into sharper focus in several key areas. In turn, this deeper level of focus helps to collate a state of the art and mainstream technical, social, cultural and political developments.