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

Human performance in visual perception by far exceeds the performance of contemporary computer vision systems. While humans are able to perceive their environment almost instantly and reliably under a wide range of conditions, computer vision systems work well only under controlled conditions in limited domains. This book sets out to reproduce the robustness and speed of human perception by proposing a hierarchical neural network architecture for iterative image interpretation. The proposed architecture can be trained using unsupervised and supervised learning techniques. Applications of the proposed architecture are illustrated using small networks. Furthermore, several larger networks were trained to perform various nontrivial computer vision tasks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of an international workshop on Pattern Detection and Discovery organized by the European Science Foundation in London, UK in September 2002.The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and reviewed for inclusion in this state-of-the-art book. Six papers present an introduction and general issues in the emerging field. Four papers are devoted to association rules. Four papers deal with various aspects of text mining and Web mining, and three papers explore advanced applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Structural and Syntctic Pattern Recognition, SSPR 2002 and the 4th International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SPR 2002 held jointly in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in August 2002.The 45 revised full papers and 35 poster papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on graphs, grammars, and languages; graphs, strings, and grammars; documents and OCR; image shape analysis and application; density estimation and distribution models; multi classifiers and fusion; feature extraction and selection; general methodology; and image shape analysis and application.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, DAS 2002, held in Princeton, NJ, USA in August 2002 with sponsorship from IAPR.The 44 revised full papers presented together with 14 short papers were carefuly reviwed and selected for inclusion in the book. All current issues in document analysis systems are adressed. The papers are organized in topical sections on OCR features and systems, handwriting recognition, layout analysis, classifiers and learning, tables and forms, text extraction, indexing and retrieval, document engineering, and new applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Pattern Recognition with Support Vector Machines, SVM 2002, held in Niagara Falls, Canada in August 2002.The 16 revised full papers and 14 poster papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 full paper submissions. The papers presented span the whole range of topics in pattern recognition with support vector machines from computational theories to implementations and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Biometric Authentication held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June 2001 as a satellite event of ECCV 2002.The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed. The papers are organized in topical sections on face recognition, fingerprint recognition, psychology and biometrics, face detection and localization, gait and signature recognition, and classifiers for recognition.

The refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Audio-and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA 2003, held in Guildford, UK, in June 2003. The 39 revised full plenary papers and 72 revised full poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. There are topical sections on face; speech; fingerprint; image, video processing, and tracking; general issues; handwriting, signature, and palm; gait; and fusion.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the AFFS International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, AFFS 2002, held in Calcutta, India, in Feburary 2002. The book presents 74 papers from 19 different countries selected out of approximately twice as many submissions. Among the topics addressed are fuzzy systems, soft computing, neural networks, pattern recognition, image processing, evolutionary computation, and data mining.

The fundamental mathematical tools needed to understand machine learning include linear algebra, analytic geometry, matrix decompositions, vector calculus, optimization, probability and statistics. These topics are traditionally taught in disparate courses, making it hard for data science or computer science students, or professionals, to efficiently learn the mathematics. This self-contained textbook bridges the gap between mathematical and machine learning texts, introducing the mathematical concepts with a minimum of prerequisites. It uses these concepts to derive four central machine learning methods: linear regression, principal component analysis, Gaussian mixture models and support vector machines. For students and others with a mathematical background, these derivations provide a starting point to machine learning texts. For those learning the mathematics for the first time, the methods help build intuition and practical experience with applying mathematical concepts. Every chapter includes worked examples and exercises to test understanding. Programming tutorials are offered on the book's web site.

This volume consists of the 42 papers presented at the International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (EMMCVPR2001), whichwasheldatINRIA(InstitutNationaldeRechercheen Informatique et en Automatique) in Sophia Antipolis, France, from September 3 through September 5, 2001. This workshop is the third of a series, which was started with EMMCVPR'97, held in Venice in May 1997, and continued with EMMCVR'99, which took place in York, in July 1999. Minimization problems and optimization methods permeate computer vision (CV), pattern recognition (PR), and many other ?elds of machine intelligence. The aim of the EMMCVPR workshops is to bring together people with research interests in this interdisciplinary topic. Although the subject is traditionally well represented at major international conferences on CV and PR, the EMMCVPR workshops provide a forum where researchers can report their recent work and engage in more informal discussions. We received 70 submissions from 23 countries, which were reviewed by the members of the program committee. Based on the reviews, 24 papers were - cepted for oral presentation and 18 for poster presentation. In this volume, no distinction is made between papers that were presented orally or as posters. The book is organized into ?ve sections, whose topics coincide with the ?ve s- sionsoftheworkshop: "ProbabilisticModelsandEstimation,""ImageModelling and Synthesis," "Clustering, Grouping, and Segmentation," "Optimization and Graphs," and "Shapes, Curves, Surfaces, and Templates."

Computer analysis of images and patterns is a scienti c eld of longstanding tradition, with roots in the early years of the computer era when electronic brains inspired scientists. Moreover, the design of vision machines is a part of humanity s dream of the arti cial person. I remember the 2nd CAIP, held in Wismar in 1987. Lectures were read in German, English and Russian, and proceedings were also only partially written in English. The conference took place under a di erent political system and proved that ideas are independent of political walls. A few years later the Berlin Wall collapsed, and Professors Sommer and Klette proposed a new formula for the CAIP: let it be held in Central and Eastern Europe every second year. There was a sense of solidarity with scienti c communities in those countries that found themselves in a state of transition to a new economy. A well-implemented idea resulted in a chain of successful events in Dresden (1991), Budapest (1993), Prague (1995), Kiel (1997), and Ljubljana (1999). This year the conference was welcomed at Warsaw. There are three invited lectures and about 90 contributions written by more than 200 authors from 27 countries. Besides Poland (60 authors), the largest representation comes from France (23), followed by England (16), Czech Republic (11), Spain (10), G- many (9), and Belarus (9). Regrettably, in spite of free registration fees and free accommodation for authors from former Soviet Union countries, we received only one accepted paper from Russia."

Driven by the requirements of a large number of practical and commercially - portant applications, the last decade has witnessed considerable advances in p- tern recognition. Better understanding of the design issues and new paradigms, such as the Support Vector Machine, have contributed to the development of - proved methods of pattern classi cation. However, while any performance gains are welcome, and often extremely signi cant from the practical point of view, it is increasingly more challenging to reach the point of perfection as de ned by the theoretical optimality of decision making in a given decision framework. The asymptoticity of gains that can be made for a single classi er is a re?- tion of the fact that any particular design, regardless of how good it is, simply provides just one estimate of the optimal decision rule. This observation has motivated the recent interest in Multiple Classi er Systems , which aim to make use of several designs jointly to obtain a better estimate of the optimal decision boundary and thus improve the system performance. This volume contains the proceedings of the international workshop on Multiple Classi er Systems held at Robinson College, Cambridge, United Kingdom (July 2{4, 2001), which was organized to provide a forum for researchers in this subject area to exchange views and report their latest results.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2002, held in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from around 50 submissions. The topics covered range from theoretical issues to applications in various fields, including lattice gases, pattern recognition, cryptography, and authentication. Less known models receive attention as well, such as probabilistic, asynchronous, and multi-level automata. Among novel applications and models are highway traffic, population and growth dynamics, environmental applications, and collective intelligence.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Computer Vision, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in March 2000.
The 20 revised full papers presented have been through two rounds of reviewing, selection, and revision and give a representative assessment of the foundational issues in multiple-image processing. The papers are organized in topical sections on 3D data acquisition and sensor design, multi-image analysis, data fusion in 3D scene description, and applied 3D vision and virtual reality.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2002, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2002.The 74 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 140 submissions. The papers address all current issues in pattern recognition. The book offers topical sections on tracking, segmentation, 3D shape, optical flow, recognition, and spherical images.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2002, held in Fukuoka, Japan, in July 2002.The 21 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are devoted to current theoretical and computational aspects of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. Among the application fields are the World Wide Web, computational biology, computer vision, multimedia, information retrieval, data compression, and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Languages in Human-Computer Interaction, GW 2001, held in London, UK, in April 2001.The 25 revised full papers and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the post-proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on gesture recognition, recognition of sign languages, nature and notations of sign languages, gesture and sign language synthesis, gestural action and interaction, and applications based on gesture control.

The Self-Organising Map (SOM), with its related techniques, is one of the most popular and powerful concepts for unsupervised pattern recognition and data visualisation. Over 3,000 applications have been reported in the open literature, and many commercial projects employ the SOM as the tool for tackling real-world problems.This volume is a complete record of the Third Workshop on Self-Organising Maps, which brought together the leading international researchers and users for an intensive three-day meeting in Lincoln, UK, and so represents the very latest developments in both theory and application of SOMs and associated approaches.Topics covered include:- Pattern recognition and data clustering;- Unsupervised learning using SOMs and other techniques;- Data visualisation;- Commercial and financial applications;- Multi-dimensional signal processing;- Component and system design and condition monitoring.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC'99, held in Jaipur, India in September 1999.The 31 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The book is divided in topical sections on vectorization, maps and geographic documents, graphic document analysis, graphic symbol and shape recognition, engineering drawings and schematics, and performance evaluation.

Presently, in our world, visual information dominates. The turn of the millenium marks the age of visual information systems. Enabled by picture sensors of all kinds turning digital, visual information will not only enhance the value of existing information, it will also open up a new horizon of previously untapped information sources. There is a huge demand for visual information access from the consumer. As well, the handling of visual information is boosted by the rapid increase of hardware and Internet capabilities. Advanced technology for visual information systems is more urgently needed than ever before: not only new computational methods to retrieve, index, compress and uncover pictorial information, but also new metaphors to organize user interfaces. Also, new ideas and algorithms are needed which allow access to very large databases of digital pictures and videos. Finally we should not forget new systems with visual interfaces integrating the above components into new types of image, video or multimedia databases and hyperdocuments. All of these technologies will enable the construction of systems that are radically different from conventional information systems. Many novel issues will need to be addressed: query formulation for pictorial information, consistency management thereof, indexing and assessing the quality of these systems. Historically, the expression Visual Information Systems can be understood either as a system for image information or as visual system for any kind information.

Multimodal Interfaces represents an emerging interdisciplinary research direction and has become one of the frontiers in Computer Science. Multimodal interfaces aim at efficient, convenient and natural interaction and communication between computers (in their broadest sense) and human users. They will ultimately enable users to interact with computers using their everyday skills. These proceedings include the papers accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2000) held in Beijing, China on 1416 O ctober 2000. The papers were selected from 172 contributions submitted worldwide. Each paper was allocated for review to three members of the Program Committee, which consisted of more than 40 leading researchers in the field. Final decisions of 38 oral papers and 48 poster papers were made based on the reviewers' comments and the desire for a balance of topics. The decision to have a single track conference led to a competitive selection process and it is very likely that some good submissions are not included in this volume. The papers collected here cover a wide range of topics such as affective and perceptual computing, interfaces for wearable and mobile computing, gestures and sign languages, face and facial expression analysis, multilingual interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, speech and handwriting, multimodal integration and application systems. They represent some of the latest progress in multimodal interfaces research.

Biometric identity verification (BIV) offers a radical alternative to passports, PIN numbers, ID cards and driving licences. It uses physiological or behavioural characteristics such as fingerprints, hand geometry, and retinas to check a person's identity. It is therefore much less open to fraudulent use, which makes it ideal for use in voting systems, financial transactions, benefit payment administration, border control, and prison access.This is the first book to provide business readers with an easy-to-read, non-technical introduction to BIV systems. It explains the background and then tells the reader how to get their system up and running quickly. It will be an invaluable read for practitioners, managers and IT personnel - in fact for anyone considering, or involved in, implementing a BIV system.Julian Ashbourn was one of the pioneers in integrating biometric technology and has provided input into many prototype BIV systems around the world.

The papers contained in this volumewere presented at the 11thAnnual Sym- sium on CombinatorialPattern Matching, held June 21-23, 2000 at the Univ- sit edeMontr eal. They were selected from 44 abstracts submitted in response to the call for papers. In addition, there were invited lectures by Andrei Broder (AltaVista), Fernando Pereira (AT&T Research Labs), and Ian H. Witten (U- versity of Waikato). The symposium was preceded by a two-day summer school set up to - tract and train young researchers. The lecturers at the school were Greg Butler, ClementLam, andGusGrahne: BLAST Howdoyousearchsequencedatabases?, DavidBryant: Phylogeny, Ra aeleGiancarlo: Algorithmicaspectsof speech rec- nition, Nadia El-Mabrouk: Genome rearrangement, LaxmiParida: Flexib- pattern discovery, and Ian H. Witten: Adaptive text mining: inferring structure from sequences. Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expr- sions graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivial combi- torial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. Over recent years a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a fully-?edged area of algorithmics

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Scale-Space and Morphology in Computer Vision, Scale-Space 2001, held in Vancouver, Canada in July 2001.The 18 revised full papers presented together with 23 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The book addresses all current aspects of scale-space and morphology in the context of computer vision, in particular, vector distance functions, optic flow, image registration, curve evolution, morphological segmentation, scalar images, vector images, automatic scale selection, geometric diffusion, diffusion filtering, image filtering, inverse problems, active contours, etc.