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

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.

The 2nd International Workshop on Statistical Methods in Video Processing, SMVP 2004, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, as an associated workshop of ECCV 2004, the 8th European Conference on Computer Vision. A total of 30 papers were submitted to the workshop. Of these, 17 papers were accepted for presentation and included in these proceedings, following a double-blind review process. The workshop had 42 registered participants. The focus of the meeting was on recent progress in the application of - vanced statistical methods to solve computer vision tasks. The one-day scienti?c program covered areas of high interest in vision research, such as dense rec- struction of 3D scenes, multibody motion segmentation, 3D shape inference, errors-in-variables estimation, probabilistic tracking, information fusion, optical ?owcomputation, learningfornonstationaryvideodata, noveltydetectionin- namic backgrounds, background modeling, grouping using feature uncertainty, and crowd segmentation from video. We wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers for their interest in the workshop.Wealsowishtothankthemembersofourprogramcommitteeandthe external reviewers for their commitment of time and e?ort in providing valuable recommendations for each submission. We are thankful to Vaclav Hlavac, the General Chair of ECCV 2004, and to Radim Sara, for the local organization of the workshop and registration management. We hope you will ?nd these proceedings both inspiring and of high scienti?c qualit

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.

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

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.

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.