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 book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2006, held in Cancun, Mexico in November 2006. The 99 revised full papers presented together with three keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research and mathematical methods.

This LNCS volume contains the papers presented at the 3rd International C- ferenceonAdvances in PatternRecognition(ICAPR2005)organizedin August, 2005 in the beautiful city of Bath, UK. The conference was ?rst organized in November 1998 in Plymouth, UK and subsequently in March 2001 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference encouraged papers that made signi?cant th- reticalandapplication-basedcontributions inpatternrecognition. The emphasis was on an open exchange of ideas and shared learning. The papers submitted to ICAPR 2005 were thoroughly reviewed by up to three referees per paper and less than 40% of the submitted papers were accepted. The papers have been ?nally published as two volumes of LNCS and these are organized under the themes of Pattern Recognition and Data Mining (which included papers from the trackson PatternRecognition Methods, Knowledgeand Learning, and Data Mining), and Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (which included papers from the Applications track). From the conference technical programme point of view, the ?rst volume contains papers on pattern recognition, data mining, signal processing and OCR/document analysis. The second volume contains - pers from the Workshop on Pattern Recognition for Crime Prevention, Security and Surveillance, Biometrics, Image Processing and Medical Imaging. ICAPR 2005was run in parallel with the InternationalWorkshop on Pattern Recognition for Crime Prevention, Security and Surveillance that was organized onthe22ndofAugust,2005. Thisworkshopbroughttogethera number ofexc- lent papers that focussed on how pattern recognition techniques can be used to developsystemsthathelpwithcrimepreventionanddetection. Onthesameday, a number of tutorials were also organized

The two volume set LNCS 4221 and LNCS 4222 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Natural Computation, ICNC 2006, held in Xi'an, China, in September 2006 as a joint event in federation with the Third International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery FSKD 2006 (LNAI 4223).

After a demanding review process 168 carefully revised full papers and 86 revised short papers were selected from 1915 submissions for presentation in two volumes. The first volume includes 130 papers related to artificial neural networks, natural neural systems and cognitive science, neural network applications, as well as evolutionary computation: theory and algorithms. The 124 papers in the second volume are orgainzed in topical sections on other topics in natural computation, natural computation techniques applications, hardware, and cross-disciplinary topics.

This LNCS volume contains the papers presented at the 3rd International C- ferenceonAdvances in PatternRecognition(ICAPR2005)organizedin August, 2005 in the beautiful city of Bath, UK. The conference was ?rst organized in November 1998 in Plymouth, UK and subsequently in March 2001 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference encouraged papers that made signi?cant th- reticalandapplication-basedcontributions inpatternrecognition. The emphasis was on an open exchange of ideas and shared learning. The papers submitted to ICAPR 2005 were thoroughly reviewed by up to three referees per paper and less than 40% of the submitted papers were accepted. The papers have been ?nally published as two volumes of LNCS and these are organized under the themes of Pattern Recognition and Data Mining (which included papers from the trackson PatternRecognition Methods, Knowledgeand Learning, and Data Mining), and Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (which included papers from the Applications track). From the conference technical programme point of view, the ?rst volume contains papers on pattern recognition, data mining, signal processing and OCR/document analysis. The second volume contains - pers from the Workshop on Pattern Recognition for Crime Prevention, Security and Surveillance, Biometrics, Image Processing and Medical Imaging. ICAPR 2005was run in parallel with the InternationalWorkshop on Pattern Recognition for Crime Prevention, Security and Surveillance that was organized onthe22ndofAugust,2005. Thisworkshopbroughttogethera number ofexc- lent papers that focussed on how pattern recognition techniques can be used to developsystemsthathelpwithcrimepreventionanddetection. Onthesameday, a number of tutorials were also organized

The two-volume set LNCS 4141, and LNCS 4142 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, ICIAR 2006. The volumes present 71 revised full papers and 92 revised poster papers together with 2 invited lectures. Volume I includes papers on image restoration and enhancement, image segmentation, image and video processing and analysis, image and video coding and encryption, image retrieval and indexing, and more.

Automatic person authentication, the identification and verification of an individual as such, has increasingly been acknowledged as a significant aspect of various security applications. Various recognition and identification systems have been based on biometrics utilizing biometric features such as fingerprint, face, retina scans, iris patterns, hand geometry, DNA traces, gait, and others.

This book originates from an international summer school on biometrics, held in Alghero, Italy, in June 2003. The seven revised tutorial lectures by leading researchers introduce the reader to biometrics-based person authentication, fingerprint recognition, gait recognition, various aspects of face recognition and face detection, topologies for biometric recognition, and hand detection. Also included are the four best selected student papers, all dealing with face recognition.

As optical character recognition (OCR) begins to find applications ranging from store checkout scanners to money-changing machines and postal system automation, it has become one of the most dynamic areas in information science today. Yet few volumes explore this data-oriented process without relying heavily on mathematical background reading.

Now, Shunji Mori, Hirobumi Nishida, and Hiromitsu Yamada, among the field's most respected researchers since its inception, present this self-contained, clearly written guidebook to OCR—the first comprehensive treatment of the preprocessing, feature-extraction, and systematic description-matching stages of the OCR process. Including a wealth of original research material available here for the first time, this book is both an ideal professional reference source and an excellent entry point for course work in the subject.

Key features of Optical Character Recognition:

• Theoretical framework based on functional analysis—not previously available in a detailed, English-language version
• Extensive explanation of preprocessing theory, including blurring and sampling, normalization, thinning, and binary and gray-scale morphology
• Intensive section on feature extraction, exploring linear methods, structure analysis, and algebraic description
• Original work on systematic shape description as a prerequisite to matching
• Original material on elastic matching, including image recognition of characters and objects
• Requires only the standard undergraduate requisites of algebra, linear algebra, and advanced calculus

IbPRIA 2005 (Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis) was the second of a series of conferences jointly organized every two years by the Portuguese and Spanish Associations for Pattern Recognition (APRP, AERFAI), with the support of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). This year, IbPRIA was hosted by the Institute for Systems and Robotics and the Geo-systems Center of the Instituto Superior Tecn ico and it was held in Estoril, Por- gal. It provided the opportunity to bring together researchers from all over the world to discuss some of the most recent advances in pattern recognition and all areas of video, image and signal processing. There was a very positive response to the Call for Papers for IbPRIA 2005. We - ceived 292 full papers from 38 countries and 170 were accepted for presentation at the conference. The high quality of the scienti?c program of IbPRIA 2005 was due ?rst to the authors who submitted excellent contributions and second to the dedicated colla- ration of the international Program Committee and the other researchers who reviewed the papers. Each paper was reviewed by two reviewers, in a blind process. We would like to thank all the authors for submitting their contributions and for sharing their - search activities. We are particularly indebted to the Program Committee members and to all the reviewers for their precious evaluations, which permitted us to set up this publication."

The two volume set LNCS 4131 and LNCS 4132 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2006, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2006.

The 208 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 475 submissions. The 103 papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on feature selection and dimension reduction for regression, learning algorithms, advances in neural network learning methods, ensemble learning, learning random neural networks and stochastic agents, hybrid architectures, self organization, connectionist cognitive science, cognitive machines, neural dynamics and complex systems, computational neuroscience, neural control, reinforcement learning and robotics applications, robotics, control, planning, as well as bio-inspired neural network on-chip implementation and applications. The second volume contains 105 contributions related to neural networks, semantic web technologies and multimedia analysis, bridging the semantic gap in multimedia machine learning approaches, signal and time series processing, data analysis, pattern recognition, visual attention algorithms and architectures for perceptional understanding and video coding, vision and image processing, computational finance and economics, neural computing in energy engineering, applications to biomedicine and bioinformatics, applications to security and market analysis, as well as real world applications.

The three volume set LNCS 3496/3497/3498 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2005, held in Chongqing, China in May/June 2005.

The 483 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1.425 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theoretical analysis, model design, learning methods, optimization methods, kernel methods, component analysis, pattern analysis, systems modeling, signal processing, image processing, financial analysis, control systems, robotic systems, telecommunication networks, incidence detection, fault diagnosis, power systems, biomedical applications, industrial applications, and other applications.

Many vision problems have to deal with di?erent entities (regions, lines, line junctions, etc.) and their relationships. These entities together with their re- tionships may be encoded using graphs or hypergraphs. The structural inf- mation encoded by graphs allows computer vision algorithms to address both the features of the di?erent entities and the structural or topological relati- ships between them. Moreover, turning a computer vision problem into a graph problem allows one to access the full arsenal of graph algorithms developed in computer science. The Technical Committee (TC15, http: //www.iapr.org/tcs.html) of the IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) has been funded in order to federate and to encourage research work in these ?elds. Among its - tivities, TC15 encourages the organization of special graph sessions at many computer vision conferences and organizes the biennial workshop GbR. While being designed within a speci?c framework, the graph algorithms developed for computer vision and pattern recognition tasks often share constraints and goals with those developed in other research ?elds such as data mining, robotics and discrete geometry. The TC15 community is thus not closed in its research ?elds but on the contrary is open to interchanges with other groups/communities

In this volume we present the contributions for the 18th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2005). The conference took place from 30 March to 1 April in Lausanne, Switzerland. EuroGP is a well-established conf- ence and the only one exclusively devoted to genetic programming. All previous proceedings were published by Springer in the LNCS series. From the outset, EuroGP has been co-located with the EvoWorkshops focusing on applications of evolutionary computation. Since 2004, EvoCOP, the conference on evolutionary combinatorial optimization, has also been co-located with EuroGP, making this year's combined events one of the largest dedicated to evolutionary computation in Europe. Genetic programming (GP) is evolutionary computation that solves complex problems or tasks by evolving and adapting a population of computer programs, using Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics as its sources of inspiration. Some of the 34 papers included in these proceedings address foundational and theoretical issues and there is also a wide variety of papers dealing with di?erent application areas, such as computer science, engineering, language processing, biology and computational design, demonstrating that GP is a powerful and practical problem-solving paradigm.

These are the proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2006), the premium European conference on computer vision, held in Graz, Austria, in May 2006. Inresponsetoourconferencecall, wereceived811papers, thelargestnumber of submissions so far. Finally, 41 papers were selected for podium presentation and 151 for presentation in poster sessions (a 23. 67% acceptance rate). The double-blind reviewing process started by assigning each paper to one of the 22 area chairs, who then selected 3 reviewers for each paper. After the reviewswerereceived, theauthorswereo?eredthepossibilitytoprovidefeedback on the reviews. On the basis of the reviews and the rebuttal of the authors, the area chairs wrote the initial consolidation report for each paper. Finally, all the area chairs attended a two-day meeting in Graz, where all decisions on acceptance/rejectionweremade. At that meeting, the areachairsresponsiblefor similar sub-?elds thoroughly evaluated the assigned papers and discussed them in great depth. Again, all decisions were reached without the knowledge of the authors' identity. We are fully aware of the fact that reviewing is always also subjective, and that somegood papers might havebeen overlooked;however, we tried our best to apply a fair selection process. The conference preparation went smoothly thanks to several people. We ?rst wish to thank the ECCV Steering Committee for entrusting us with the orga- zationoftheconference. Wearegratefultotheareachairs, whodidatremendous job in selecting the papers, and to more than 340 ProgramCommittee members and 220 additional reviewers for all their professional e?orts

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Biometrics, ICB 2006, held in Hong Kong, China in January 2006. The book includes 104 revised full papers covering such areas of biometrics as the face, fingerprint, iris, speech and signature, biometric fusion and performance evaluation, gait, keystrokes, and more. In addition the results of the Face Authentication Competition (FAC 2006) are also announced in this volume.