The development of technologies for the identi?cation of individuals has driven the interest and curiosity of many people. Spearheaded and inspired by the Bertillon coding system for the classi?cation of humans based on physical measurements, scientists and engineers have been trying to invent new devices and classi?cation systems to capture the human identity from its body measurements. One of the main limitations of the precursors of today's biometrics, which is still present in the vast majority of the existing biometric systems, has been the need to keep the device in close contact with the subject to capture the biometric measurements. This clearly limits the applicability and convenience of biometric systems. This book presents an important step in addressing this limitation by describing a number of methodologies to capture meaningful biometric information from a distance. Most materials covered in this book have been presented at the International Summer School on Biometrics which is held every year in Alghero, Italy and which has become a ?agship activity of the IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics (IAPR TC4). The last four chapters of the book are derived from some of the best p- sentations by the participating students of the school. The educational value of this book is also highlighted by the number of proposed exercises and questions which will help the reader to better understand the proposed topics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial Evolution, EA 2005, held in Lille, France, in October 2005. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers cover all aspects of artificial evolution: genetic programming, machine learning, combinatorial optimization, co-evolution, self-assembling, artificial life and bioinformatics.

These volumes present together a total of 64 revised full papers and 128 revised posters papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on camera calibration, stereo and pose, texture, face recognition, variational methods, tracking, geometry and calibration, lighting and focus, in the first volume. The papers of the second volume cover topics as detection and applications, statistics and kernels, segmentation, geometry and statistics, signal processing, and video processing.

First of all, we want to congratulate two new research communities from M- ico and Brazil that have recently joined the Iberoamerican community and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. We believe that the series of congresses that started as the "Taller Iberoamericano de Reconocimiento de Patrones (TIARP)," and later became the "Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP)," has contributed to these groupconsolidatione?orts. We hope that in the near future all the Iberoamerican countries will have their own groups and associations to promote our areas of interest; and that these congresses will serve as the forum for scienti?c research exchange, sharing of - pertise and new knowledge, and establishing contacts that improve cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition and related areas. CIARP 2004 (9th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition) was the ninthinaseriesofpioneeringcongressesonpatternrecognitionintheIberoam- ican community. As in the previous year, CIARP 2004 also included worldwide participation. It took place in Puebla, Mexico. The aim of the congress was 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 languagep- cessing and recognition, to name a few.

Consistent advances in biometrics help to address problems that plague traditional human recognition methods and offer significant promise for applications in security as well as general convenience. In particular, newly evolving systems can measure multiple physiological or behavioral traits and thereby increase overall reliability that much more. Multimodal Biometrics provides an accessible, focused examination of the science and technology behind multimodal human recognition systems, as well as their ramifications for security systems and other areas of application. After clearly introducing multibiometric systems, the book demonstrates the noteworthy advantages of these systems over their traditional and unimodal counterparts. In addition, the work describes the various scenarios possible when consolidating evidence from multiple biometric systems.This authoritative, comprehensive volume on multimodal biometric systems concisely and clearly outlines their great promise for higher reliability than conventional human verification systems. will need to know and use the concepts, principles, and methods of advanced biometrics.

Following the previous four annual conferences, the 5th Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (Sinobiometrics 2004) was held in Guangzhou, China in December 2004. The conference this year was aimed at promoting the international exchange of ideas and providing an opportunity for keeping abreast of the latest developments in biometric algorithms, systems, and applications. The 1st Biometrics Verification Competition (BVC) on face, iris, and fingerprint recognition was also conducted in conjunction with the conference. This book is composed of 74 papers presented at Sinobiometrics 2004, contributed by researchers and industrial practitioners from Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, UK, US, as well as China. Of these, 60 papers were selected from 140 submissions and 14 were invited. The papers not only presented recent technical advances, but also addressed issues in biometric system design, standardization, and applications. Included among the invited were four feature papers on the ideas and algorithms of the best-performing biometric engines, which were either competition winners at the Face Authentication Test (FAT) 2004 or the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) 2004, or they were the best-performing iris and palmprint recognition algorithms. The papers were complemented by five keynote lectures on biometrics, and face, fingerprint, and iris authentication and multimodal fusion by Arun Ross (West Virginia University) and Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University), Josef Kittler (University of Surrey), John Daugman (University of Cambridge), Raffaele Cappelli (University of Bologna), and Stan Z. Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences).

We are delighted to present the proceedings of DAGM 2004, and wish to - press our gratitude to the many people whose e?orts made the success of the conference possible. We received 146 contributions of which we were able to - cept 22 as oral presentations and 48 as posters. Each paper received 3 reviews, upon which decisions were based. We are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the program committee and the numerous referees. The careful review process led to the exciting program which we are able to present in this volume. Among the highlights of the meeting were the talks of our four invited spe- ers, renowned experts in areas spanning learning in theory, in vision and in robotics: - William T. Freeman, Arti?cial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT: Sharing F- tures for Multi-class Object Detection - PietroPerona,Caltech:TowardsUnsupervisedLearningofObjectCategories - StefanSchaal,DepartmentofComputerScience,UniversityofSouthernC- ifornia: Real-Time Statistical Learning for Humanoid Robotics - Vladimir Vapnik, NEC Research Institute: Empirical Inference WearegratefulforeconomicsupportfromHondaResearchInstituteEurope, ABW GmbH, Transtec AG, DaimlerChrysler, and Stemmer Imaging GmbH, which enabled us to ? nance best paper prizes and a limited number of travel grants. Many thanks to our local support Sabrina Nielebock and Dagmar Maier, who dealt with the unimaginably diverse range of practical tasks involved in planning a DAGM symposium. Thanks to Richard van de Stadt for providing excellent software and support for handling the reviewing process. A special thanks goes to Jeremy Hill, who wrote and maintained the conference website.

The computational paradigm considered here is a conceptual, theoretical and formal framework situated above machines and living creatures (two instant- tions), su?ciently solid, and still non-exclusive, that allows us: 1. tohelpneuroscientiststoformulateintentions, questions, experiments, me- ods and explanation mechanisms assuming that neural circuits are the p- chological support of calculus; 2. to help scientists and engineers from the ?elds of arti?cial intelligence (AI) and knowledge engineering (KE) to model, formalize and program the c- putable part of human knowledge; 3. to establish an interaction framework between natural system computation (NSC) and arti?cial system computation (ASC) in both directions, from ASC to NSC (in computational neuroscience), and from NSC to ASC (in bioinspired computation). With these global purposes, we organized IWINAC 2005, the 1st International Work Conference on the Interplay Between Natural and Arti?cial Computation, whichtookplaceinLasPalmasdeGranCanaria, CanaryIslands(Spain), during June 15 18, 2005, trying to contribute to both directions of the interplay: I: From Arti?cial to Natural Computation. What can computation, arti?cial intelligence (AI) and knowledge engineering (KE) contribute to the und- standing of the nervous system, cognitive processes and social behavior? This is the scope of computational neuroscience and cognition, which uses the computational paradigm to model and improve our understanding of natural scienc

Biometric authentication is increasingly gaining popularity in a large spectrum ofapplications,rangingfromgovernmentprograms(e. g. ,nationalIDcards,visas for international travel,and the ?ght against terrorism) to personal applications such as logical and physical access control. Although a number of e?ective - lutions are currently available, new approaches and techniques are necessary to overcomesomeofthelimitationsofcurrentsystemsandtoopenupnewfrontiers in biometric research and development. The 30 papers presented at Biometric Authentication Workshop 2004 (BioAW 2004) provided a snapshot of current research in biometrics, and identify some new trends. This volume is composed of?vesections:facerecognition,?ngerprintrecognition,templateprotectionand security, other biometrics, and fusion and multimodal biometrics. For classical biometrics like ?ngerprint and face recognition, most of the papers in Sect. 1 and 2 address robustness issues in order to make the biometric systems work in suboptimal conditions: examples include face detection and recognition - der uncontrolled lighting and pose variations, and ?ngerprint matching in the case of severe skin distortion. Benchmarking and interoperability of sensors and liveness detection are also topics of primary interest for ?ngerprint-based s- tems. Biometrics alone is not the solution for complex security problems. Some of the papers in Sect. 3 focus on designing secure systems; this requires dealing with safe template storage, checking data integrity, and implementing solutions in a privacy-preserving fashion. The match-on-tokens approach, provided that current accuracy and cost limitations can be satisfactorily solved by using new algorithms and hardware, is certainly a promising alternative. The use of new biometric indicators like eye movement, 3D ?nger shape, and soft traits (e. g.

The past decade has seen a rapid growth in the demand for biometric-based - thentication solutions for a number of applications. With signi?cant advances in biometrictechnologyandanincreaseinthenumberofapplicationsincorporating biometrics, it is essential that we bring together researchers from academia and industry as well as practitioners to share ideas, problems and solutions for the development and successful deployment of state-of-the-art biometric systems. The InternationalConference onBiometric Authentication (ICBA 2004)was the ?rst major gathering in the Asia-Paci?c region devoted to facilitating this interaction. We are pleased that this conference attracted a large number of high-quality research papers that will bene't the international biometrics - search community. After a careful review of 157 submissions, 101 papers were acceptedeitherasoral(35)orposter(66)presentations.Inadditiontothesete- nical presentations, this conference also presented the results and summaries of threebiometric competitions: FingerprintVeri?cationCompetition (FVC 2004), Face Authentication Competition (FAC 2004), and Signature Veri?cation C- petition (SVC 2004). This conference provided a forum for the practitioners to discuss their practical experiences in applying the state-of-the-art biometric technologies which will further stimulate research in biometrics. We aregrateful to Jim L. Wayman, Edwin Rood, Raymond Wong, Jonathon Philips, andFrancisHoforacceptingourinvitationtogivekeynotetalksatICBA 2004. In addition, we would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, program committee and organizing committee members who made this a very successful conference. We also wish to acknowledge the Croucher Foundation, the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IEEE Hong Kong Section, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the National Natural S- ence Foundation in China, and Springer-Verlag for sponsoring this conference

The 15th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching was held in Ciragan Palace Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey during July 5 7, 2004. CPM 2004 - peated the success of its predecessors; it even surpassed them in terms of the numberofinvitedspeakers, thenumberofsubmissions, andthenumberofpapers accepted and presented at the conference. In response to the call for papers, CPM 2004 received a record number of 79 high-quality submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three program committee members and the comments were returned to the authors. Following an extensive electronic discussion period, the Program Committee accepted36ofthesubmissionstobepresentedattheconference.Theyconstitute originalresearchcontributionsincombinatorialpatternmatchingalgorithmsand datastructures, molecularsequenceanalysis, phylogenetictreeconstruction, and RNA and protein structure analysis and prediction. CPM 2004 had ?ve invited speakers. In alphabetical order they were: Evan Eichler from the University of Washington, USA, Martin Farach-Colton from Rutgers University, USA, Paolo Ferragina from the University of Pisa, Italy, Piotr Indyk from MIT, USA, and Gene Myers from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. It is impossible to organize such a successful program without the help of many individuals. We would like to express our appreciation to the authors of the submitted papers and to the program committee members and external referees, who provided timely and signi?cant reviews. July 2004 S.C. Sahinalp, S. Muthukrishnan, U. Dogrusoz Organization CPM 2004 was locally organized by Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Within Bilkent University, the Center for Bioinformatics (BCBI) and the Computer Engineering Department cooperate

"Intelligent systems are those which produce intelligent o?springs." AI researchers have been focusing on developing and employing strong methods that are capable of solving complex real-life problems. The 18th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Arti?cial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2005) held in Bari, Italy presented such work performed by many scientists worldwide. The Program Committee selected long papers from contributions presenting more complete work and posters from those reporting ongoing research. The Committee enforced the rule that only original and unpublished work could be considered for inclusion in these proceedings. The Program Committee selected 116 contributions from the 271 subm- ted papers which cover the following topics: arti?cial systems, search engines, intelligent interfaces, knowledge discovery, knowledge-based technologies, na- ral language processing, machine learning applications, reasoning technologies, uncertainty management, applied data mining, and technologies for knowledge management. The contributions oriented to the technological aspects of AI and the quality of the papers are witness to a research activity clearly aimed at consolidating the theoretical results that have already been achieved. The c- ference program also included two invited lectures, by Katharina Morik and Roberto Pieraccini. Manypeoplecontributedindi?erentwaystothesuccessoftheconferenceand to this volume. The authors who continue to show their enthusiastic interest in applied intelligence research are a very important part of our success. We highly appreciate the contribution of the members of the Program Committee, as well as others who reviewed all the submitted papers with e?ciency and dedication.

It is both an honor and a pleasure to hold the 27th Annual Meeting of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2005, at the Vienna U- versity of Technology, Austria, organized by the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing (PRIP) Group. We received 122 contributions of which we were able to accept 29 as oral presentations and 31 as posters. Each paper received three reviews, upon which decisions were made based on correctness, presentation, technical depth, scienti?c signi?cance and originality. The selection as oral or poster presentation does not signify a quality grading but re?ects attractiveness to the audience which is also re?ected in the order of appearance of papers in these proceedings. The papers are printed in the same order as presented at the symposium and posters are integrated in the corresponding thematic session. In putting these proceedings together, many people played signi?cant roles which we would like to acknowledge. First of all our thanks go to the authors who contributed their work to the symposium. Second, we are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the Program Committee for their e?ort in evaluating the submitted papers and inprovidingthe necessarydecisionsupport information and the valuable feedback for the authors. Furthermore, the P- gram Committee awarded prizes for the best papers, and we want to sincerely thank the donors. We were honored to have the following three invited speakers at the conf- ence: - Jan P.

The computational paradigm considered here is a conceptual, theoretical and formal framework situated above machines and living creatures (two instant- tions), su?ciently solid, and still non-exclusive, that allows us: 1. tohelpneuroscientiststoformulateintentions, questions, experiments, me- ods and explanation mechanisms assuming that neural circuits are the p- chological support of calculus; 2. to help scientists and engineers from the ?elds of arti?cial intelligence (AI) and knowledge engineering (KE) to model, formalize and program the c- putable part of human knowledge; 3. to establish an interaction framework between natural system computation (NSC) and arti?cial system computation (ASC) in both directions, from ASC to NSC (in computational neuroscience), and from NSC to ASC (in bioinspired computation). With these global purposes, we organized IWINAC 2005, the 1st International Work Conference on the Interplay Between Natural and Arti?cial Computation, whichtookplaceinLasPalmasdeGranCanaria, CanaryIslands(Spain), during June 15 18, 2005, trying to contribute to both directions of the interplay: I: From Arti?cial to Natural Computation. What can computation, arti?cial intelligence (AI) and knowledge engineering (KE) contribute to the und- standing of the nervous system, cognitive processes and social behavior? This is the scope of computational neuroscience and cognition, which uses the computational paradigm to model and improve our understanding of natural scienc

E-commerce services are su?ering abuse by programs (bots, spiders, etc.) m- querading as legitimate human users. E?orts to defend against such attacks have, over the past several years, stimulated investigations into a new family of security protocols - "Human Interactive Proofs" (HIPs) - which allow a person to authenticate herself as a member of a given group: e.g., as a human (vs. a machine), as herself (vs. anyoneelse), as an adult (vs. a child). Most commercial usesofHIPstodayareCAPTCHAs,"CompletelyAutomaticPublicTuringtests to tell Computers and Humans Apart," which exploit the gap in ability between humans and machine vision systems in reading images of text. HIP challenges can also be non-graphical, e.g., requiring recognition of speech, solving puzzles, etc. Wearepleasedtopresentthe?rstrefereedandarchivallypublishedcollection of state-of-the-art papers on HIPs and CAPTCHAs. Each paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee, judged by the Co-chairs to be of su?cient relevance and quality, and revised by the authors in response to the referees' suggestions. The papers investigate performance analysis of novel CAPTCHAs, HIP - chitectures, and the role of HIPs within security systems. Kumar Chellapilla, Kevin Larson, Patrice Simard, and Mary Czerwinski describe user trials of a CAPTCHA designed to resist segmentation attacks, including a systematic evaluation of its tolerance by human users. Henry Baird, Michael Moll, and Sui- Yu Wang analyze data from a human legibility trial of another segmentati- resistantCAPTCHAandlocateahighlylegibleengineeringregime.AmaliaRusu and Venu Govindaraju describe research towards CAPTCHAs based on reading synthetically damaged images of real images of unconstrained handwritten text.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Audio- and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA 2005, held in Hilton Rye Town, NY, USA, in July 2005.

The 66 revised oral papers and 50 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers discuss all aspects of biometrics including iris, fingerprint, face, palm print, gait, gesture, speaker, and signature; theoretical and algorithmic issues are dealt with as well as systems issues. The industrial side of biometrics is evident from presentations on smart cards, wireless devices, and architectural and implementation aspects.

This book and its sister volumes constitute the proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN 2005). ISNN 2005 was held in the beautiful mountain city Chongqing by the upper Yangtze River in southwestern China during May 30-June 1, 2005, as a sequel of ISNN 2004 successfully held in Dalian, China. ISNN emerged as a leading conference on neural computation in the region with - creasing global recognition and impact. ISNN 2005 received 1425 submissions from authors on ?ve continents (Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Oc- nia), 33 countries and regions (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, India, Nepal, Iran, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Portugal, UK, USA, Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand). Based on rigorous reviews, 483 high-quality papers were selected by the Program Committee for presentation at ISNN 2005 and publication in the proce- ings, with an acceptance rate of less than 34%. In addition to the numerous contributed papers, 10 distinguished scholars were invited to give plenary speeches and tutorials at ISNN 2005.

The belief that a committee of people make better decisions than any individual is widely held and appreciated. We also understand that, for this to be true, the members of the committee have to be simultaneously competent and comp- mentary. This intuitive notion holds true for committees of data sources (such as sensors) and models (such as classi?ers). The substantial current research in the areas of data fusion and model fusion focuses on ensuring that the di?- ent sources provide useful information but nevertheless complement one another to yield better results than any source would on its own. During the 1990s, a variety of schemes in classi?er fusion, which is the focus of this workshop, were developed under many names in di?erent scienti?c communities such as machine learning, pattern recognition, neural networks, and statistics. The previous ?ve workshops on Multiple Classi?er Systems (MCS) were themselves exercises in information fusion, with the goal of bringing the di?erent scienti?c commu- ties together, providing each other with di?erent perspectives on this fascinating topic, and aiding cross-fertilization of ideas. These ?ve workshops achieved this goal, demonstrating signi? cant advances in the theory, algorithms, and appli- tions of multiple classi?er systems. Followingits?vepredecessorspublishedbySpringer,thisvolumecontainsthe proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Multiple Classi?er Systems (MCS2005)heldattheEmbassySuitesinSeaside,California,USA,June13-15, 2005. Forty-two papers were selected by the Scienti?c Committee, and they were organized into the following sessions: Boosting, Combination Methods, Design of Ensembles, Performance Analysis, and Applications.

The 16th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching was held on Jeju Island, Korea on June 19-22, 2005. Previous meetings were held in Paris, London, Tucson, Padova, Asilomar, Helsinki, Laguna Beach, Aarhus, Piscataway, Warwick, Montreal, Jerusalem, Fukuoka, Morelia, and Istanbul over the years 1990-2004. In response to the call for papers, CPM 2005 received a record number of 129papers.Eachsubmissionwasreviewedbyatleast threeProgramCommittee members with the assistance of external referees. Since there were many hi- quality papers, the Program Committee's task was extremely di?cult. Through an extensive discussion the Program Committee accepted 37 of the submissions tobepresentedattheconference.Theyconstituteoriginalresearchcontributions in combinatorial pattern matching and its applications. Inadditiontotheselectedpapers, CPM2005hadthreeinvitedpresentations, by Esko Ukkonen from the University of Helsinki, Ming Li from the University of Waterloo, and Naftali Tishby from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We would like to thank all Program Committee members and external r- erees for their excellent work, especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We also thank all who s- mitted papers for consideration; they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally, we thank the Organizing Committee members and the graduates- dents who worked hard to put in place the logistical arrangements of the c- ference. It is their dedicated contribution that made the conference possible and enjoyable

Fuzzy Models and Algorithms for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing presents a comprehensive introduction of the use of fuzzy models in pattern recognition and selected topics in image processing and computer vision. Unique to this volume in the Kluwer Handbooks of Fuzzy Sets Series is the fact that this book was written in its entirety by its four authors. A single notation, presentation style, and purpose are used throughout. The result is an extensive unified treatment of many fuzzy models for pattern recognition. The main topics are clustering and classifier design, with extensive material on feature analysis relational clustering, image processing and computer vision. Also included are numerous figures, images and numerical examples that illustrate the use of various models involving applications in medicine, character and word recognition, remote sensing, military image analysis, and industrial engineering.

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.

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."

Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8-10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of "traditional" topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAS community. From the scienti?c point of view, several research ?elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e?ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries.

CIARP 2003 (8th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition) was the eighth event in a series of pioneering congresses on pattern recognition in the Latin American c- munity of countries. This year, however, the forum was extended to include worldwide participation. The event has been held in the past in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and Por- gal; it took place this year in Havana (Cuba). The aim of the congress was to promote and disseminate ongoing research into mathematical methods for pattern recognition, computer vision, image analysis, and speech recognition, as well as the application of these techniques in such diverse areas as robotics, industry, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis, and natural language processing and recognition to name a few. Moreover it was a forum for scienti?c re- arch, experience exchange, the sharing of new knowledge, and establishing contacts to improve cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition, computer vision and related areas. The congress was organized by the Institute of Cybernetics, Mathematics and P- sics of Cuba (ICIMAF) and the Center for Computing Research (CIC) of the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and was sponsored by the University of La Salle, - xico, the University of Oriente, Cuba, the Polytechnic Institute Jose A."

We are proud to present the proceedings of DAGM 2003, and we want to express our appreciation to the many people whose e?orts made this conference such a success. We received about 140 papers from around the world, but we could only acceptabouthalfofthesesubmissionsfororalandposterpresentationssoasnot to overload the agenda. Each paper was assigned three reviewers who followed a careful anonymous selection procedure. The quality of the research paper and its suitability for presentation were the main criteria in this very di?cult selection process.Our32reviewershadatoughjobevaluatingthesepapersand,ofcourse, the job was even tougher whenever contributions were rejected. We thank the reviewers for their time and e?ort. The program committee awarded prizes for the best papers, and we want to sincerely thank the donors. The following three invited papers were among the highlights: - Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University, USA): Who's Who? Challenges in Biometric Authentication - Michael Unser (EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland): Splines and Wavelets: New Perspectives and Opportunities for Pattern Recognition - Bernd Jahne .. (Heidelberg University, Germany): Image Sequence Analysis in Environmental and Life Sciences We are also very grateful and proud that several well-known experts enhanced our conference by o?ering tutorial sessions to our participants: - Christian Perwass, Gerald Sommer (Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany): (Cli?ord) Algebra - Introduction and Applications - Hans-HeinrichBothe (TechnicalUniversityofDenmark,Oersted-DTU):- aptive Paradigms for Pattern Recognition - Peter Kau?, Oliver Schreer (Frauenhofer Institut fur .. Nachrichtentechnik, Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, Berlin, Germany): Concepts, Systems and Al- rithms for Immersive Video Communication - Michael Felsberg (Link. oping University, Sweden): Systematic Approaches to