The need to improve communication between humans and computers has been instrumental in de ning new modalities of communication, and new ways of interacting with machines. Gestures can convey information for which other modalities are not e cient or suitable. In natural and user-friendly interaction, gesturescanbeused, asasinglemodality, orcombinedinmultimodalinteraction schemes which involvespeech, or textual media. Speci cation methodologiescan be developed to design advanced interaction processes in order to de ne what kind of gestures are used, which meaning they convey, and what the paradigms of interaction are. Research centred on gesture interaction has recently provided signi cant technologicalimprovements, in particular: gesture capture and tra- ing (from video streams or other input devices), motion recognition, motion generation, and animation. In addition, active research in the elds of signal processing, pattern recognition, arti cial intelligence, and linguistics is relevant to the areas covered by the multidisciplinary research on gesture as a means of communication. Resulting fromathree-dayinternationalworkshopin Gif-sur-Yvette, France, with 80 participants from ten countries all over the world, this book presents contributions on gesture under the focus of human-computer communication. The workshop was run by Universit e Paris Sud, Orsay, on the lines of GW'96 at York University, UK, and GW'97 at Bielefeld University, Germany. Its purpose was to bring together scientists from researchand industrial organisationswo- ing on all aspects of gesture modelling and interaction. The book is organised in sixsections, coveringhumanperceptionandproductionofgesture, gestureloc- isation and movement segmentation, vision-based recognition and sign language recognition, gesture synthesis and animation, and multimodality.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 98, held in Piscataway, NJ, USA, in July 1998. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers address all current issues in combinatorial pattern matching dealing with a variety of classical objects to be matched as well as with DNA coding.

This volume contains papers presented at the Fourth European Conference on ComputationalLearningTheory, whichwasheldatNordkirchenCastle, inNo- kirchen, NRW, Germany, from March 29 to 31, 1999. This conference is the fourth in a series of bi-annual conferences established in 1993. TheEuroCOLTconferencesarefocusedontheanalysisoflearningalgorithms and the theory of machine learning, and bring together researchers from a wide variety of related elds. Some of the issues and topics that are addressed include the sample and computational complexity of learning speci c model classes, frameworks modeling the interaction between the learner, teacher and the en- ronment (such as learning with queries, learning control policies and inductive inference), learningwithcomplexmodels(suchasdecisiontrees, neuralnetworks, and support vector machines), learning with minimal prior assumptions (such as mistake-bound models, universal prediction, and agnostic learning), and the study of model selection techniques. We hope that these conferences stimulate an interdisciplinary scienti c interaction that will be fruitful in all represented elds. Thirty- ve papers were submitted to the program committee for conside- tion, and twenty-one of these were accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings. In addition, Robert Schapire (AT & T Labs), and Richard Sutton (AT & T Labs) were invited to give lectures and contribute a written version to these proceedings. There were a number of other joint events including a banquet and an excursion to Munster ] . The IFIP WG 1.4 Scholarship was awarded to Andra s Antos for his paper \Lower bounds on the rate of convergence of nonparametric pattern recognition.""

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Genetic Programming, EuroPG '99, held in Göteborg, Sweden in May 1999.The 12 revised full papers and 11 posters presented have been carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. All the relevant aspects of genetic programming are addressed ranging from traditional and foundational issues to applications in a variety of fields.

Graph-based representation of images is becoming a popular tool since it represents in a compact way the structure of a scene to be analyzed and allows for an easy manipulation of sub-parts or of relationships between parts. Therefore, it is widely used to control the different levels from segmentation to interpretation. The 14 papers in this volume are grouped in the following subject areas: hypergraphs, recognition and detection, matching, segmentation, implementation problems, representation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Brazilian Symposium on Document Image Analysis, BSDIA'97, held in Curitiba in November 1997. The volume presents 19 revised full papers selected from 30 submissions as well as eight full-paper invited contributions by internationally leading authorities. The invited papers give a unique survey of the state of the art in the area. The selected papers are organized in sections on low level processing, document processing and retrieval, handwriting recognition, signature verification, and application systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP '97, held in Kiel, Germany, in September 1997.
The volume presents 92 revised papers selected during a double-blind reviewing process from a total of 150 high-quality submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern analysis, object recognition and tracking, invariants, applications, shape, texture analysis, motion calibration, low-level processing, structure from motion, stereo and correspondence, segmentation and grouping, mathematical morphology, pose estimation, and face analysis.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the two IAPR International Workshops on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SSPR'98 and SPR'98, held in Sydney, Australia, in August 1998.
The book presents 107 revised full papers selected from 134 submissions. Also included are six invited presentations. The papers are organized in topical sections on structural matching and grammatical inference, recognition of 2D and 3D objects, document image analysis and recognition, handwritten character recognition, shape representation and image segmentation, learning methodologies, feature selection and extraction, statistical classification techniques, statistical pattern recognition, and rejection in pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Audio- and Video-based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA'97, held in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in March 1997.
The 49 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected by the program committee for inclusion in the book; also included are four invited contributions. The papers are organized in sections on facial features localisation, lip and facial motion, visual non-face biometrics, face-based authentication, text-dependent speaker authentication, text-independent authentication, audio-video features and fusion, and systems and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-98, held in Ames, Iowa, in July 1998.
The 23 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book from a total of 35 submissions. The book addresses a wide range of grammatical inference theory such as automata induction, grammar induction, automatic language acquisition, etc. as well as a variety of applications in areas like syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

Nachdem die letztjiihrige DAGM-Tagung an der iiltesten Universitat Deutsch- lands stattfand, freut es uns, daJ3 wir das diesjahrige Mustererkennungs-Sym- posium jetzt an Deutschlands altester Technischer Universitat nun schon zum zweitenmal veranstalten durfen. An der Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig (gegrundet im Jahre 1745) ist Forschung auf den Gebieten der Mustererken- nung, der Sprachverarbeitung und der Bildverarbeitung schon seit Jahrzehnten im Institut fiir Nachrichtentechnik (INT) beheimatet. Seit 1986 wird am Institut fiir Robotik und Prozefiinformatik (IRP) auf den Gebieten der aktiven optischen 3D Oberflachenerfassung und der Analyse von Tiefendaten fiir vision-gestutzte Robotikanwendungen geforscht. Daneben gibt es an der Technischen Universitat sowie an den Forschungseinrichtungen der Region eine Vielzahl von Bereichen, in denen Methoden der Mustererkennung in unterschiedlichsten Anwendungsgebie- ten fur den praktischen Einsatz vorbereitet werden; diese reichen von melkenden Robotern bis hin zur sichtgestutzten automatischen Navigation von Helikoptern und zu Anwendungen in der virtuellen Medizin. Von insgesamt 90 eingereichten Beitragen wurden yom Programmkomitee 34 als Vortrag und 30 zur Posterprasentation angenommen. Die Beitrage uberdecken - wie in fruheren Jahren auch - das gesamte Spektrum des von der DAGM be- treuten Themengebietes: Von den theoretischen Grundlagen, Musterinvarianten, neuronalen Netzen uber die Bildsegmentierung bis hin zur Erkennung in und Interpretation von statischen und dynamischen 3D Szenen. Auch Beitrage zur Schrift- und Spracherkennung sind wiederum wesentlicher Bestandteil des Pro- gramms. Bei den Anwendungen ist dieses Jahr insbesondere der medizinische Bereich stark vertreten.

This volume collects together refereed versions of twenty-five papers presented at the 4th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at University College London in April 1997. The "NCPW" workshop series is now well established as a lively forum which brings together researchers from such diverse disciplines as artificial intelligence, mathematics, cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, philosophy and psychology to discuss their work on connectionist modelling in psychology. The general theme of this fourth workshop in the series was "Connectionist Repre sentations," a topic which not only attracted participants from all these fields, but from allover the world as well. From the point of view of the conference organisers focusing on representational issues had the advantage that it immediately involved researchers from all branches of neural computation. Being so central both to psychology and to connectionist modelling, it is one area about which everyone in the field has their own strong views, and the diversity and quality of the presentations and, just as importantly, the discussion which followed them, certainly attested to this."

This book presents the theoretical aspects and practical development of a computer vision system for searching an image for a specified model object; this system is reliable, tolerates imperfections in the image and model, and is fast enough for real-world applications.
A number of search techniques are evaluated. The capabilities of the author's image search system are demonstrated on a variety of examples, and applications using it to track moving objects and navigate mobile robots are shown. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in model-based object recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Eighth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 97, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in June/July 1997.
The volume presents 20 revised full papers carefully selected from 32 submissions received; also included are abstracts of two invited contributions. The volume is devoted to the issue of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns, such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets and arrays. The results presented are particularly relevant to molecular biology, but also to information retrieval, pattern recognition, compiling, data compression and program analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR'97, held in Venice, Italy, in May 1997.
The book presents 29 revised full papers selected from a total of 62 submissions. Also included are four full invited papers and a keynote paper by leading researchers. The volume is organized in sections on contours and deformable models, Markov random fields, deterministic methods, object recognition, evolutionary search, structural models, and applications. The volume is the first comprehensive documentation of the application of energy minimization techniques in the areas of compiler vision and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Structural and Syntactical Pattern Recognition, SSPR '96, held in Leipzig, Germany in August 1996.
The 36 revised full papers included together with three invited papers were carefully selected from a total of 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on grammars and languages; morphology and mathematical approaches to pattern recognition; semantic nets, relational models and graph-based methods; 2D and 3D shape recognition; document image analysis and recognition; and handwritten and printed character recognition.

This book presents the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, ICIAP '95, held in Sanremo, Italy in September 1995 under the sponsorship of the International Association of Pattern Recognition IAPR.
The volume presents 108 papers selected from more than 180 submissions together with six invited contributions. The papers are written by a total of 265 contributing authors and give a comprehensive state-of-the-art report on all current issues of image analysis and processing. Theoretical aspects are addressed as well as systems design and advanced applications, particularly in medical imaging.

This book presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP '95, held in Prague, Czech Republic in September 1995.
The volume presents 61 full papers and 75 posters selected from a total of 262 submissions and thus gives a comprehensive view on the state-of-the-art in computer analysis of images and patterns, research, design, and advanced applications. The papers are organized in sections on invariants, segmentation and grouping, optical flow, model recovery and parameter estimation, low level vision, motion detection, structure and matching, active vision and shading, human face recognition, calibration, contour, and sessions on applications in diverse areas.

Progress in Gestural Interaction contains papers presented at the first Gesture Workshop, which was designed to bring together researchers working on gesture-based interfaces and gestural interaction and to provide a forum for the presentation and exchange of ideas and research currently in progress. It encompassed all aspects of gestural interaction, including:- what are gestures?; appropriateness of gestures used in interfaces; interactional issues; suitable applications; sign-language recognition. Papers are presented from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, USA and Ireland to provide an international viewpoint and the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of gestural interaction, human-computer interaction, multi-modal interfaces, automatic sign language interpretation and pattern recognition. It could also be a useful supplementary text for courses on multi-modal human-computer interaction.

In the last decade unsupervised pattern discovery in time series, i.e. the problem of finding recurrent similar subsequences in long multivariate time series without the need of querying subsequences, has earned more and more attention in research and industry. Pattern discovery was already successfully applied to various areas like seismology, medicine, robotics or music. Until now an application to automotive time series has not been investigated. This dissertation fills this desideratum by studying the special characteristics of vehicle sensor logs and proposing an appropriate approach for pattern discovery. To prove the benefit of pattern discovery methods in automotive applications, the algorithm is applied to construct representative driving cycles.

This book contains revised refereed papers selected from the presentations at the First International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, held in University Park, PA, USA, in August 1995.
The 23 full papers included are divided into sections on low-level processing, vectorization and segmentation of scanned graphics documents; symbol and diagram recognition, map processing, interpretation of engineering drawings. Each section contains both survey articles to assess the state of the art, and research papers presenting novel results. One section is devoted to a contest held to determine the best algorithm for detection of dashed lines in drawings. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions and recommendations of the discussions held during the workshop.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM '96, held in Laguna Beach, California, USA, in June 1996.
The 26 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 48 submissions; also included are two invited papers. Combinatorial pattern matching has become a full-fledged area of algorithmics with important applications in recent years.
The book addresses all relevant aspects of combinatorial pattern matching and its importance in information retrieval, pattern recognition, compiling, data compression, program analysis, and molecular biology and thus describes the state of the art in the area.

The papers that appear in this volume are refereed versions of presenta tions made at the third Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at Stirling University, Scotland, from 31 August to 2 September 1994. The aim of this series of conferences has been to explore the interface between Neural Computing and Psychology: this has been a fruitful area for many researchers for a number of reasons. The development ofNeural Computation has supplied tools to researchers in Cognitive Neuroscience, allowing them to look at possible mechanisms for implementing theories which would otherwise remain 'black box' techniques. These theories may be high-level theories, concerned with interaction between a number of brain areas, or low-level, describing the way in which smaller local groups of neurons behave. Neural Computation techniques have allowed computer scientists to implement systems which are based on how real brains appear to function, providing effective pattern recognition systems. We can thus mount a two-pronged attack on perception. The papers here come from both the Cognitive Psychology viewpoint and from the Computer Science viewpoint: it is a mark of the growing maturity of the interface between the two subjects that they can under stand each other's papers, and the level of discussion at the workshop itself showed how important each camp considers the other to be. The papers here are divided into four sections, reflecting the primary areas of the material."

This book focuses on end-to-end robotic applications using vision and control algorithms, exposing its readers to design innovative solutions towards sensors-guided robotic bin-picking and assembly in an unstructured environment. The use of sensor fusion is demonstrated through a bin-picking task of texture-less cylindrical objects. The system identification techniques are also discussed for obtaining precise kinematic and dynamic parameters of an industrial robot which facilitates the control schemes to perform pick-and-place tasks autonomously without any interference from the user. The uniqueness of this book lies in a judicious balance between theory and technology within the context of industrial application. Therefore, it will be valuable to researchers working in the area of vision- and force control- based robotics, as well as beginners in this inter-disciplinary area, as it deals with the basics and technologically advanced research strategies.

This book contains the written contributions to the program of the First In ternational Conference on Computer Vision, Virtual Reality, and Robotics in Medicine (CVRMed'95) held in Nice during the period April 3-6, 1995. The articles are regrouped into a number of thematic sessions which cover the three major topics of the field: medical image understanding, registration problems in medicine, and therapy planning, simulation and control. The objective of the conference is not only to present the most innovative and promising research work but also to highlight research trends and to foster dialogues and debates among participants. This event was decided after a preliminary successful symposium organized in Stanford in March 1994 by E. Grimson (MIT), T. Kanade (CMU), R. Kikinis and W. Wells (Chair) (both at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital), and myself (INRIA). We received 92 submitted full papers, and each one was evaluated by at least three members of the Program Committee, with the help of auxiliary reviewers. Based on these evaluations, a representative subset of the Program Committee met to select 19 long papers, 29 regular papers, and 27 posters. The geographical repartition of the contributions is the following: 24 from European countries (other than France), 23 contributions from France, 20 from Northern America (USA and Canada), and 8 from Asia (Japan and Singapore).