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.

ICIAR 2004, the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, was the ?rst ICIAR conference, and was held in Porto, Portugal. ICIAR will be organized annually, and will alternate between Europe and North America. ICIAR 2005 will take place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The idea of o?ering these conferences came as a result of discussion between researchers in Portugal and Canada to encourage collaboration and exchange, mainly between these two countries, but also with the open participation of other countries, addressing recent advances in theory, methodology and applications. The response to the call for papers for ICIAR 2004 was very positive. From 316 full papers submitted, 210 were accepted (97 oral presentations, and 113 - sters). The review process was carried out by the Program Committee members and other reviewers; all are experts in various image analysis and recognition areas. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewing parties. The high q- lity of the papers in these proceedings is attributed ?rst to the authors, and second to the quality of the reviews provided by the experts. We would like to thank the authors for responding to our call, and we wholeheartedly thank the reviewers for their excellent work in such a short amount of time. We are espe- ally indebted to the Program Committee for their e?orts that allowed us to set up this publication. We were very pleased to be able to include in the conference, Prof. Murat KuntfromtheSwissFederalInstituteofTechnology, andProf. Mario Figueiredo, oftheInstitutoSuperiorT ecnico, inPortugal."

1 Thisbookcontainsrefereedandimprovedpaperspresentedatthe5thIAPR - ternational Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2003). GREC 2003 was held in the Computer Vision Center, in Barcelona (Spain) during July 30-31, 2003. TheGRECworkshopisthemainactivityoftheIAPR-TC10, theTechnical 2 Committee on Graphics Recognition . Edited volumes from the previous wo- shops in the series are available as Lecture Notes in Computer Science: LNCS Volume 1072 (GREC 1995 at Penn State University, USA), LNCS Volume 1389 (GREC 1997 in Nancy, France), LNCS Volume 1941 (GREC 1999 in Jaipur, India), and LNCS Volume 2390 (GREC 2001 in Kingston, Canada). Graphics recognition is a particular ?eld in the domain of document ana- sis that combines pattern recognition and image processing techniques for the analysis of any kind of graphical information in documents, either from paper or electronic formats. Topics of interest for the graphics recognition community are: vectorization; symbol recognition; analysis of graphic documents with - agrammatic notation like electrical diagrams, architectural plans, engineering drawings, musical scores, maps, etc.; graphics-based information retrieval; p- formance evaluation in graphics recognition; and systems for graphics recog- tion. Inadditiontotheclassicobjectives, inrecentyearsgraphicsrecognitionhas faced up to new and promising perspectives, some of them in conjunction with other, a?ne scienti?c communities. Examples of that are sketchy interfaces and on-line graphics recognition in the framework of human computer interaction, or query by graphic content for retrieval and browsing in large-format graphic d- uments, digital libraries and Web applications. Thus, the combination of classic challenges with new research interests gives the graphics recognition ?eld an active scienti?c community, with a promising future

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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 volume contains all papers presented at SSPR 2004 and SPR 2004, hosted by the Instituto de Telecomunicac" ,oes/Instituto Superior T' ecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, August 18-20, 2004. This was the fourth time that the two workshops were held back-to-back. The SSPR was the tenth International Workshop on Structural and Synt- tic Pattern Recognition, and the SPR was the ?fth International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition. These workshops have traditi- ally been held in conjunction with ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition), and are the major events for technical committees TC2 and TC1, respectively, of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The workshops were closely coordinated, being held in parallel, with plenary talks and a common session on hybrid systems. This was an attempt to resolve thedilemmaofhowto dealwiththeneedfornarrow-focusspecializedworkshops yet accommodate the presentation of new theories and techniques that blur the distinction between the statistical and the structural approaches. A total of 219 papers were received from many countries, with the subm- sion and reviewing processes being carried out separately for each workshop. A total of 59 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 64 for posters. In - dition, four invited speakers presented informative talks and overviews of their research. They were: Alberto Sanfeliu, from the Technical University of Cata- nia, Spain; Marco Gori, from the University of Siena, Italy; Nello Cristianini, from the University of California, USA; and Erkki Oja, from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, winner of the 2004 Pierre Devijver Award.

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.

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 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.

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.

This volume provides students, researchers and application developers with the knowledge and tools to get the most out of using neural networks and related data modelling techniques to solve pattern recognition problems. Each chapter covers a group of related pattern recognition techniques and includes a range of examples to show how these techniques can be applied to solve practical problems. Features of particular interest include:- A NETLAB toolbox which is freely available via the Internet at http://www.ncrg.aston.ac.uk/netlab- Worked examples, demonstration programs and over 100 graded exercises- Cutting edge research made accessible for the first time in a highly usable form- Comprehensive coverage of visualisation methods, Bayesian techniques for neural networks and Gaussian ProcessesAlthough primarily a textbook for teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in pattern recognition and neural networks, this book will also be of interest to practitioners and researchers who can use the toolbox to develop application solutions and new models."...provides a unique collection of many of the most important pattern recognition algorithms. With its use of compact and easily modified MATLAB scripts, the book is ideally suited to both teaching and research."Christopher Bishop, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK"...a welcome addition to the literature on neural networks and how to train and use them to solve many of the statistical problems that occur in data analysis and data mining" Jack Cowan, Mathematics Department, University of Chicago, US"If you have a pattern recognition problem, you should consider NETLAB; if you use NETLAB you must have this book." Keith Worden, University of Sheffield, UK

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."

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

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2003, held in Groningen, The Netherlands in August 2003. The 94 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis and understanding, video analysis, segmentation, shape, classification, face recognition, interpolation and spatial transformations, and filtering.

ICIAR 2004, the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, was the ?rst ICIAR conference, and was held in Porto, Portugal. ICIAR will be organized annually, and will alternate between Europe and North America. ICIAR 2005 will take place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The idea of o?ering these conferences came as a result of discussion between researchers in Portugal and Canada to encourage collaboration and exchange, mainly between these two countries, but also with the open participation of other countries, addressing recent advances in theory, methodology and applications. The response to the call for papers for ICIAR 2004 was very positive. From 316 full papers submitted, 210 were accepted (97 oral presentations, and 113 - sters). The review process was carried out by the Program Committee members and other reviewers; all are experts in various image analysis and recognition areas. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewing parties. The high q- lity of the papers in these proceedings is attributed ?rst to the authors, and second to the quality of the reviews provided by the experts. We would like to thank the authors for responding to our call, and we wholeheartedly thank the reviewers for their excellent work in such a short amount of time. We are espe- ally indebted to the Program Committee for their e?orts that allowed us to set up this publication. We were very pleased to be able to include in the conference, Prof. Murat KuntfromtheSwissFederalInstituteofTechnology, andProf. Mario Figueiredo, oftheInstitutoSuperiorT ecnico, inPortugal."

The refereed proceedings of the 4th IAPR International Workshop on Graph-Based Representation in Pattern Recognition, GbRPR 2003, held in York, UK in June/July 2003. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on data structures and representation, segmentation, graph edit distance, graph matching, matrix methods, and graph clustering.

The refereed proceedings of the First Iberial Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPria 2003, held in Puerto de Andratx, Mallorca, Spain in June 2003. The 130 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 full papers submitted. All current aspects of ongoing research in computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and speech recognition are addressed.

Machine Learning has become a key enabling technology for many engineering applications, investigating scientific questions and theoretical problems alike. To stimulate discussions and to disseminate new results, a summer school series was started in February 2002, the documentation of which is published as LNAI 2600.

This book presents revised lectures of two subsequent summer schools held in 2003 in Canberra, Australia, and in T bingen, Germany. The tutorial lectures included are devoted to statistical learning theory, unsupervised learning, Bayesian inference, and applications in pattern recognition; they provide in-depth overviews of exciting new developments and contain a large number of references.

Graduate students, lecturers, researchers and professionals alike will find this book a useful resource in learning and teaching machine learning.