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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 Fifth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI-2000) was heldinLisbononSeptember11-13th,2000.ICGI-2000wasthe?fthinaseriesof successfulbiennialinternationalconferencesintheareaofgrammaticalinference. Previous conferences were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Montpellier, France; and Ames, Iowa, USA. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Gram- tical inference, the process of inferring grammar from given data, is a ?eld that is not only challenging from a purely scienti?c standpoint but also ?nds many applications in real world problems. Despitethefactthatgrammaticalinferenceaddressesproblemsinarelatively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and intersects a number of di?erent disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from ?elds as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational ling- stics, pattern recognition and arti?cial neural networks. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas such as natural language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information retrieval, text processing and adaptive intelligent agents have either been - monstrated or proposed in the literature. ICGI-2000 was held jointly with CoNLL-2000, the Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop and LLL-2000, the Second Learning Language in LogicWorkshop.Thetechnicalprogramincludedthepresentationof24accepted papers (out of 35 submitted) as well as joint sessions with CoNLL and LLL. A tutorial program organized by Gabriel Pereira Lopes took place after the meetings and included tutorials by Raymond Mooney, Gregory Grefenstette, Walter Daelemans, Ant onio Ribeiro, Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, Gael Dias, Nuno Marques, VitorRossio, Jo aoBalsaandAlexandreAgostini.Thejointrealization of these events represents a unique opportunity for researchers in these related ?elds to interact and exchange ideas."

The AMDO 2000 workshop took place at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) on 7-9 September 2000, sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee, the European Commission by - man Potential Program:High Level Scienti?c Conferences and the Mathematics andComputer Science DepartmentofUIB. Thesubject ofthe workshopwas- goingresearchinarticulatedmotiononthesequenceofimagesandsophisticated models for deformable objects. The goals of these areas are to understand and interpret object motion around complex objects that we can ?nd in sequences of images in the real world. These topics (geometry and physics of deformable models, motion analysis, articulated models and animation, visualization of - formable models, 3D recovery from motion, single or multiple human motion analysis and synthesis, applications of deformable models and motion analysis, etc. ) are interesting examples of how research can be used to solve more general problems. Another objective of this workshop was to relate ?elds using c- puter graphics, computer animation or applications in several disciplines c- bining synthetic and analytical images. In this regard it is of particular interest to encouragelinksbetweenresearchersinareasofcomputervisionandcomputer graphics who have common problems and frequently use similar techniques. The workshop included four sessions of presented papers and two tutorials. Invited speakers treating various aspects of the topics were: Y. Aloimonos from the Computer Vision Laboratory, Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, USA, G. Medioni from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent S- tems,UniversityofSouthernCalifornia,USA,andR. Boulic,Adjointscienti?que from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. September 2000 H. -H. Nagel and F. J.