The two volume set LNCS 4291 and LNCS 4292 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2006, held in Lake Tahoe, NV, USA in November 2006.

The 65 revised full papers and 56 poster papers presented together with 57 papers of ten special tracks were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 280 submissions. The papers cover the four main areas of visual computing.

As well as conveying a message in words and sounds, the speech signal carries information about the speaker's own anatomy, physiology, linguistic experience and mental state. These speaker characteristics are found in speech at all levels of description: from the spectral information in the sounds to the choice of words and utterances themselves.

This two volume set, LNAI 4343 and LNAI 4441, constitutes a state-of-the-art survey for the field of speaker classification. It approaches the following questions: What characteristics of the speaker become manifest in his or her voice and speaking behavior? Which of them can be inferred from analyzing the acoustic realizations? What can this information be used for? Which methods are the most suitable for diversified problems in this area of research? How should the quality of the results be evaluated?

The 22 articles of the second volume comprise a number of selected self-contained papers on research projects in the field of speaker classification. These include among other things a report on a gender recognition system; a study on emotion recognition; a presentation of a text-dependent speaker verification system; an account of the analysis of both speaker and verbal content information - as well as studies on accent identification.

The two volume set LNCS 4141, and LNCS 4142 constitute the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, ICIAR 2006, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal in September 2006.

The 71 revised full papers and 92 revised poster papers presented together with 2 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 389 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image restoration and enhancement, image segmentation, image and video processing and analysis, image and video coding and encryption, image retrieval and indexing, motion analysis, and tracking in the first volume. The second volume contains topical sections on pattern recognition for image analysis, computer vision, biometrics, shape and matching, biomedical image analysis, brain imaging, remote sensing image processing, and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Analysis and Modelling of Faces and Gestures, AMFG 2007, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in October 2007 within the scope of ICCV 2007, the International Conference on Computer Vision.

The 8 revised full papers presented together with 13 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers review the status of recognition, analysis and modeling of face, gesture, activity, and behavior. Topics addressed include feature representation, 3D face, robust recognition under pose and illumination variations, video-based face recognition, learning, facial motion analysis, body pose estimation, and sign recognition.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL 2007, held in Shanghai, China, in June 2007.

The 54 revised full papers presented together with 1 keynote lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The papers are organized in topical section on image and video retrieval, visual biometrics, intelligent visual information processing, visual data mining, ubiquitous and mobile visual information systems, semantics, 2D/3D graphical visual data retrieval, and applications of visual information systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PReMI 2007, held in Kolkata, India in December 2007.

The 82 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 241 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition, image analysis, soft computing and applications, data mining and knowledge discovery, bioinformatics, signal and speech processing, document analysis and text mining, biometrics, and video analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2006, held in Barcelona, Spain, July 2006. The book presents 33 revised full papers together with 3 invited talks, organized in topical sections on data structures, indexing data structures, probabilistic and algebraic techniques, applications in molecular biology, string matching, data compression, and dynamic programming.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC 2005, held in Hong Kong, China, August 2005. The book presents 37 revised full papers together with a panel discussion report, organized in topical sections on engineering drawings vectorization and recognition, symbol recognition, graphic image analysis, structural document analysis, sketching and online graphics recognition, curves and shape processing, and graphics recognition contest results.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2007, held in Heidelberg Germany in September 2007.

The 55 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on image filtering, restoration and segmentation, shape analysis and representation, recognition, categorization and detection, computer vision and image retrieval, machine learning and statistical data analysis, biomedical data analysis, motion analysis and tracking, pose recognition, stereo and structure from motion, multi-view image and geometric processing, as well as 3D view registration and surface modelling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2007, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2007.

The 120 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 251 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on motion detection and tracking, medical imaging, biometrics, colour, curves and surfaces beyond two dimensions, reading characters, words, lines etc., image segmentation, shape, im age registration and matching, signal decomposition and invariants, as well as features and classification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th IAPR-TC-15 International Workshop on Graph-Based Representations in Pattern Recognition, GbRPR 2007, held in Alicante, Spain in June 2007.

The 23 revised full papers and 14 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on matching, distances and measures, graph-based segmentation and image processing, graph-based clustering, graph representations, pyramids, combinatorial maps and homologies, as well as graph clustering, embedding and learning.

The two-volume set LNCS 4477 and 4478 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2007, held in Girona, Spain in June 2007.

The 48 revised full papers and 108 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 328 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition, human language technology, special architectures and industrial applications, motion analysis, image analysis, biomedical applications, shape and texture analysis, 3D, as well as image coding and processing.

Although research in computer vision for recognizing 3D objects in photographs dates back to the 1960s, progress was relatively slow until the turn of the millennium, and only now do we see the emergence of effective techniques for recognizing object categories with different appearances under large variations in the observation conditions. Tremendous progress has been achieved in the past five years, thanks largely to the integration of new data representations, such as invariant semi-local features, developed in the computer vision community with the effective models of data distribution and classification procedures developed in the statistical machine-learning community.

This volume is a post-event proceedings volume and contains selected papers based on presentations given, and vivid discussions held, during two workshops held in Taormina in 2003 and 2004. The main goals of these two workshops were to promote the creation of an international object recognition community, with common datasets and evaluation procedures, to map the state of the art and identify the main open problems and opportunities for synergistic research, and to articulate the industrial and societal needs and opportunities for object recognition research worldwide.

The 30 thoroughly revised papers presented are organized in the following topical sections: recognition of specific objects, recognition of object categories, recognition of object categories with geometric relations, and joint recognition and segmentation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Coherence for Visual Motion Analysis, 2004, held in May 2004. The eleven revised full research papers presented went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers in this volume cover a wide range in the field of motion analysis that is a central problem in computer vision. The workshop examined techniques for integrating spatial coherence constraints during motion analysis of image sequences.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2007, held in London, Canada in July 2007.

The 32 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithmic techniques, approximate pattern matching, data compression, computational biology, pattern analysis, suffix arrays and trees, as well as algorithmic techniques.

The interconnected ideas of inductive databases and constraint-based mining are appealing and have the potential to radically change the theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery. This book reports on the results of the European IST project "cInQ" (consortium on knowledge discovery by Inductive Queries) and its final workshop entitled Constraint-Based Mining and Inductive Databases organized in Hinterzarten, Germany in March 2004.

The two-volume set LNCS 4477 and 4478 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2007, held in Girona, Spain in June 2007.

The 48 revised full papers and 108 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 328 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition, human language technology, special architectures and industrial applications, motion analysis, image analysis, biomedical applications, shape and texture analysis, 3D, as well as image coding and processing.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, ADG 2004, held at Gainesville, FL, USA in September 2004.

The 12 revised full papers presented aurvey current issues theoretical and methodological topics as well as applications thereof - in particular automated geometry theorem proving, automated geometry problem solving, problems of dynamic geometry, and an object-oriented language for geometric objects.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2006. The book presents 32 revised full papers and 44 revised poster papers together with 5 invited papers. Topical sections include image filtering, restoration and segmentation, shape analysis and representation, recognition, categorization and detection, computer vision and image retrieval, machine learning and statistical data analysis, biomedical data analysis, and more.

CIARP 2005 (10th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, X CIARP) is the 10th event in the series of pioneer congresses on pattern recognition in the Iberoamerican community, which takes place in La Habana, Cuba. As in previous years, X CIARP brought together international scientists to promote and disseminate ongoing research and mathematical methods for pattern recognition, image analysis, and applications in such diverse areas as computer vision, robotics, industry, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis, and natural language processing and recognition, to name a few. Moreover, X CIARP was a forum for scientific research, experience exchange, share of new knowledge and increase in cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition, computer vision and related areas. The 10th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition was organized by the Cuban Association for Pattern Recognition (ACRP) and sponsored by the Institute of Cybernetics, Mathematics and Physics (ICIMAF), the Advanced Technologies Application Center (CENATAV), the University of Oriente (UO), the Polytechnic Institute "Jose A Echevarria" (ISPJAE), the Central University of Las Villas (UCLV), the Ciego de Avila University (UNICA), as well as the Center of Technologies Research on Information and Systems (CITIS-UAEH) in Mexico. The conference was also co-sponsored by the Portuguese Association for Pattern Recognition (APRP), the Spanish Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI), the Special Interest Group of the Brazilian Computer Society (SIGPR-SBC), and the Mexican Association for Computer Vision, Neurocomputing and Robotics (MACVNR). X CIARP was endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

Automatic and reliable authentication of individuals is becoming an essential part of the modern world, for security and convenience in our life, in our work andin society.Biometrics-basedsystems utilize physiologicalorbehavioralch- acteristics of an individual including the face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, hand, voice, signature, or a combination of them, for this task. We are now seeing increasing interest and practical deployment of biometric systems. TheInternationalWorkshoponBiometricRecognitionSystems(IWBRS2005) was held in conjunction with ICCV 2005, providing an interactive forum for leading biometrics researchersand system designers.A biometric authentication competition (BAC) was conducted by the workshopto track the state-of-the-art biometrics technologies. This volume of workshop proceedings includes 32 papers carefully selected from a total of 130 submissions. The papers address the problems in face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, speech, writing and other biometrics, and contribute new ideastoresearchanddevelopmentofreliableandpracticalsolutionsforbiometric authentication. We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, and ProgramCommittee and OrganizingCommittee members who made this a very successful workshop. We also wish to acknowledge the Institute of Automation, ChineseAcademyofSciences,andSpringerforsponsoringthisworkshop.Special thanks are due to Miao Hong, Xin Yang, Zhuoshi Wei, Yinghao Cai, Zhaofeng He, Cheng Zhong, Shiqi Yu and Xianchao Qiu for their hard work in workshop organization. We hope you could bene?t from the fruitful workshop to improve the perf- mance of your biometric systems.

During the last 30 years, face recognition and related problems such as face detection/tracking and facial expression recognition have attracted researchers from both the engineering and psychology communities. In addition, extensive research has been carried out to study hand and body gestures. The understanding of how humans perceive these important cues has significant scientific value and extensive applications. For example, human-computer interaction, visual surveillance, and smart video indexing are active application areas. Aiming towards putting such amazing perception capability onto computer systems, researchers have made substantial progress. However, technological challenges still exist in many aspects. Following a format similar to the IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG) 2003, this one-day workshop (AMFG 2005) provided a focused international forum to bring together well-known researchers and research groups to review the status of recognition, analysis and modeling of faces and gestures, to discuss the challenges that we are facing, and to explore future directions. Overall, 30 papers were selected from 90 submitted manuscripts. The topics of these papers range from feature representation, robust recognition, learning, and 3D modeling to psychology. In addition, two invited talks were given, by Prof. Kanade and Dr. Phillips. The technical program was organized into four oral sessions and two poster sessions. This workshop would not have been possible without the timely reviews provided by the members of the Technical Program Committee under a tight schedule. October 2005 Wenyi Zhao Shaogang Gong Xiaoou Tang

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition, SSPR 2006 and the 6th International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SPR 2006, held jointly in Hong Kong, China in August 2006 as a satellite event of the 18th International Conference of Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2006.

The 38 revised full papers and 61 revised poster papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 217 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image analysis, vision, character recognition, bayesian networks, graph-based methods, similarity and feature extraction, image and video, vision, kernel-based methods, recognition and classification, similarity and feature extraction, document analysis, graph-based methods, recognition and classification, image analysis, facial image analysis, representation, feature selection, clustering, multiple classifier systems, recognition and classification, unsupervised learning, dimensionality, representation, biometrics, and applications.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP 2005). This conference - ries started about 20 years ago in Berlin. Initially, the conference served as a forum for meetings between scientists from Western and Eastern-block co- tries. Nowadays, the conference attracts participants from all over the world. The conference gives equal weight to posters and oral presentations, and the selected presentation mode is based on the most appropriate communication medium. The program follows a single-track format, rather than parallel s- sions. Non-overlapping oral and poster sessions ensure that all attendees have the opportunity to interact personally with presenters. As for the numbers, we received a total of 185 submissions. All papers were reviewed by two to four members of the Program Committee. The ?nal selection was carried out by the Conference Chairs. Out of the 185 papers, 65 were - lected for oral presentation and 43 as posters. CAIP is becoming well recognized internationally, and this year's presentations came from 26 di?erent countries. South Korea proved to be the most active scienti?cally with a total of 16 - cepted papers. At this point, we wish to thank the Program Committee and additional referees for their timely and high-quality reviews. The paper s- mission and review procedure was carried out electronically. We also thank the invited speakers Reinhardt Koch and Thomas Vetter for kindly accepting to present invited papers.

This self-contained introduction to machine learning, designed from the start with engineers in mind, will equip students with everything they need to start applying machine learning principles and algorithms to real-world engineering problems. With a consistent emphasis on the connections between estimation, detection, information theory, and optimization, it includes: an accessible overview of the relationships between machine learning and signal processing, providing a solid foundation for further study; clear explanations of the differences between state-of-the-art techniques and more classical methods, equipping students with all the understanding they need to make informed technique choices; demonstration of the links between information-theoretical concepts and their practical engineering relevance; reproducible examples using Matlab, enabling hands-on student experimentation. Assuming only a basic understanding of probability and linear algebra, and accompanied by lecture slides and solutions for instructors, this is the ideal introduction to machine learning for engineering students of all disciplines.