This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Design Science Symposium, EDSS 2013 held in Dublin, Ireland, in November 2013. The 9 papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. The papers deal with various topics in the design science research.

This volume features key contributions from the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, (ICPRAM 2012,) held in Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal from February 6th-8th, 2012. The conference provided a major point of collaboration between researchers, engineers and practitioners in the areas of Pattern Recognition, both from theoretical and applied perspectives, with a focus on mathematical methodologies. Contributions describe applications of pattern recognition techniques to real-world problems, interdisciplinary research, and experimental and theoretical studies which yield new insights that provide key advances in the field. This book will be suitable for scientists and researchers in optimization, numerical methods, computer science, statistics and for differential geometers and mathematical physicists.

Graph Embedding for Pattern Recognition covers theory methods, computation, and applications widely used in statistics, machine learning, image processing, and computer vision. This book presents the latest advances in graph embedding theories, such as nonlinear manifold graph, linearization method, graph based subspace analysis, L1 graph, hypergraph, undirected graph, and graph in vector spaces. Real-world applications of these theories are spanned broadly in dimensionality reduction, subspace learning, manifold learning, clustering, classification, and feature selection. A selective group of experts contribute to different chapters of this book which provides a comprehensive perspective of this field.

Pattern recognition basically deals with the recognition of patterns, shapes, objects, things in images. Document image analysis was one of the very ?rst applications of pattern recognition and even of computing. But until the 1980s, research in this ?eld was mainly dealing with text-based documents, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and page layout analysis. Only a few people were looking at more speci?c documents such as music sheet, bank cheques or forms. The community of graphics recognition became visible in the late 1980s. Their speci?c interest was to recognize high-level objects represented by line drawings and graphics. The speci?c pattern recognition problems they had to deal with was raster-to-graphics conversion (i.e., recognizing graphical primitives in a cluttered pixel image), text-graphics separation, and symbol recognition. The speci?c problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents has received a lot of attention. The symbols to be recognized can be musical notation, electrical symbols, architectural objects, pictograms in maps, etc. At ?rst glance, the symbol recognition problems seems to be very similar to that of character recognition; - ter all, characters are basically a subset of symbols. Therefore, the large know-how in OCR has been extensively used in graphical symbol recognition: starting with segmenting the document to extract the symbols, extracting features from the s- bols, and then recognizing them through classi?cation or matching, with respect to a training/learning set.

This volume introduces a formal representation framework for modelling and reasoning, that allows us to quantify the uncertainty inherent in the use of vague descriptions to convey information between intelligent agents. This can then be applied across a range of applications areas in automated reasoning and learning. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by applying it to problems in data analysis where the aim is to infer effective and informative models expressed as logical rules and relations involving vague concept descriptions. The author also introduces a number of learning algorithms within the framework that can be used for both classification and prediction (regression) problems. It is shown how models of this kind can be fused with qualitative background knowledge such as that provided by domain experts. The proposed algorithms will be compared with existing learning methods on a range of benchmark databases such as those from the UCI repository.

This, the 26th issue of the Transactions on Computational Science journal, is comprised of ten extended versions of selected papers from the International Conference on Cyberworlds 2014, held in Santander, Spain, in June 2014. The topics covered include areas of virtual reality, games, social networks, haptic modeling, cybersecurity, and applications in education and arts.

Style is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the human experience: Everyone instantly and constantly assesses people and things according to their individual styles, academics establish careers by researching musical, artistic, or architectural styles, and entire industries maintain themselves by continuously creating and marketing new styles. Yet what exactly style is and how it works are elusive: We certainly know it when we see it, but there is no shared and clear understanding of the diverse phenomena that we call style. The Structure of Style explores this issue from a computational viewpoint, in terms of how information is represented, organized, and transformed in the production and perception of different styles. New computational techniques are now making it possible to model the role of style in the creation of and response to human artifacts-and therefore to develop software systems that directly make use of style in useful ways. Argamon, Burns, and Dubnov organize the research they have collected in this book according to the three roles that computation can play in stylistics. The first section of the book, Production, provides conceptual foundations by describing computer systems that create artifacts-musical pieces, texts, artworks-in different styles. The second section, Perception, explains methods for analyzing different styles and gleaning useful information, viewing style as a form of communication. The final section, Interaction, deals with reciprocal interaction between style producers and perceivers, in areas such as interactive media, improvised musical accompaniment, and game playing. The Structure of Style is written for researchers and practitioners in areas including information retrieval, computer art and music, digital humanities, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, who can all benefit from this comprehensive overview and in-depth description of current research in this active interdisciplinary field.

The two-volume set CCIS 483 and CCIS 484 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition, CCPR 2014, held in Changsha, China, in November 2014. The 112 revised full papers presented in two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 225 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals of pattern recognition; feature extraction and classification; computer vision; image processing and analysis; video processing and analysis; biometric and action recognition; biomedical image analysis; document and speech analysis; pattern recognition applications.

Biometrics and Kansei Engineering is the first book to bring together the principles and applications of each discipline. The future of biometrics is in need of new technologies that can depend on people's emotions and the prediction of their intention to take an action. Behavioral biometrics studies the way people walk, talk, and express their emotions, and Kansei Engineering focuses on interactions between users, products/services and product psychology. They are becoming quite complementary. This book also introduces biometric applications in our environment, which further illustrates the close relationship between Biometrics and Kansei Engineering. Examples and case studies are provided throughout this book. Biometrics and Kansei Engineering is designed as a reference book for professionals working in these related fields. Advanced-level students and researchers studying computer science and engineering will find this book useful as a reference or secondary text book as well.

Recent advances in biometrics include new developments in sensors, modalities and algorithms. As new sensors are designed, newer challenges emerge in the algorithms for accurate recognition. Written for researchers, advanced students and practitioners to use as a handbook, this volume captures the very latest state-of-the-art research contributions from leading international researchers. It offers coverage of the entire gamut of topics in the field, including sensors, data acquisition, pattern-matching algorithms, and issues that impact at the system level, such as standards, security, networks, and databases

The three volume set LNCS 8834, LNCS 8835, and LNCS 8836 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2014, held in Kuching, Malaysia, in November 2014. The 231 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 375 submissions. The selected papers cover major topics of theoretical research, empirical study, and applications of neural information processing research. The 3 volumes represent topical sections containing articles on cognitive science, neural networks and learning systems, theory and design, applications, kernel and statistical methods, evolutionary computation and hybrid intelligent systems, signal and image processing, and special sessions intelligent systems for supporting decision, making processes, theories and applications, cognitive robotics, and learning systems for social network and web mining.

The two volume set LNCS 8887 and 8888 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2014, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA. The 74 revised full papers and 55 poster papers presented together with 39 special track papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 280 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: Part I (LNCS 8887) comprises computational bioimaging, computer graphics; motion, tracking, feature extraction and matching, segmentation, visualization, mapping, modeling and surface reconstruction, unmanned autonomous systems, medical imaging, tracking for human activity monitoring, intelligent transportation systems, visual perception and robotic systems. Part II (LNCS 8888) comprises topics such as computational bioimaging , recognition, computer vision, applications, face processing and recognition, virtual reality, and the poster sessions.

Throughout much of machine vision's early years the infrared imagery has suffered from return on investment despite its advantages over visual counterparts. Recently, the ?scal momentum has switched in favor of both manufacturers and practitioners of infrared technology as a result of today's rising security and safety challenges and advances in thermographic sensors and their continuous drop in costs. This yielded a great impetus in achieving ever better performance in remote surveillance, object recognition, guidance, noncontact medical measurements, and more. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to recent successful efforts made on merging computer vision applications (nonmilitary only) and nonvisual imagery, as well as to ?ll in the need in the literature for an up-to-date convenient reference on machine vision and infrared technologies. Augmented Perception in Infrared provides a comprehensive review of recent deployment of infrared sensors in modern applications of computer vision, along with in-depth description of the world's best machine vision algorithms and intel- gent analytics. Its topics encompass many disciplines of machine vision, including remote sensing, automatic target detection and recognition, background modeling and image segmentation, object tracking, face and facial expression recognition, - variant shape characterization, disparate sensors fusion, noncontact physiological measurements, night vision, and target classi?cation. Its application scope includes homeland security, public transportation, surveillance, medical, and military. Mo- over, this book emphasizes the merging of the aforementioned machine perception applications and nonvisual imaging in intensi?ed, near infrared, thermal infrared, laser, polarimetric, and hyperspectral bands.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 36th German Conference on Pattern Recognition, GCPR 2014, held in Munster, Germany, in September 2014. The 58 revised full papers and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on variational models for depth and flow, reconstruction, bio-informatics, deep learning and segmentation, feature computation, video interpretation, segmentation and labeling, image processing and analysis, human pose and people tracking, interpolation and inpainting.

"Ultra Low Bit-Rate Speech Coding" focuses on the specialized topic of speech coding at very low bit-rates of 1 Kbits/sec and less, particularly at the lower ends of this range, down to 100 bps. The authors set forth the fundamental results and trends that form the basis for such ultra low bit-rates to be viable and provide a comprehensive overview of various techniques and systems in literature to date, with particular attention to their work in the paradigm of unit-selection based segment quantization. The book is for research students, academic faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners in the areas of speech processing and speech coding.

David Stevens Space-based information, which includes earth observation data, is increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. We have been relying for decades on data obtained from meteorological satellites for updates on the weather and to monitor weather-related natural disasters such as hurricanes. We now count on our personal satellite-based navigation systems to guide us to the nearest Starbucks Coffee and use web-based applications such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth to study the area of places we will or would like to visit. At the same time, satellite-based technologies have experienced impressive growth in recent years with an increase in the number of available sensors, an increase in spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions, an increase in the availability of radar satellites such as Terrasar-X and ALOS, and the launching of specific constellations such as the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), COSMO- SkyMed (COnstellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation) and RapidEye. Even more recent are the initiatives being set-up to ensure that space-based information is being accessed and used by decision makers, such as Sentinel Asia for the Asia and Pacific region and SERVIR for the Latin America and Caribbean region.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2015, held in London, UK, in September 2015. The 28 full and 6 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers cover research in all aspects of string processing, information retrieval, computational biology, pattern matching, semi-structured data, and related applications.

A state-of-the-art research monograph providing consistent treatment of supervisory control, by one of the world's leading groups in the area of Bayesian identification, control, and decision making.

"This book guides you in the journey of 3D modeling from the theory with elegant mathematics to applications with beautiful 3D model pictures. Written in a simple, straightforward, and concise manner, readers will learn the state of the art of 3D reconstruction and modeling." -Professor Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University The computer vision and graphics communities use different terminologies for the same ideas. This book provides a translation, enabling graphics researchers to apply vision concepts, and vice-versa, independence of chapters allows readers to directly jump into a specific chapter of interest, compared to other texts, gives more succinct treatment overall, and focuses primarily on vision geometry. Image-Based Modeling is for graduate students, researchers, and engineers working in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics, image processing, robotics, virtual reality, and photogrammetry.

Micromechanical manufacturing based on microequipment creates new possibi- ties in goods production. If microequipment sizes are comparable to the sizes of the microdevices to be produced, it is possible to decrease the cost of production drastically. The main components of the production cost - material, energy, space consumption, equipment, and maintenance - decrease with the scaling down of equipment sizes. To obtain really inexpensive production, labor costs must be reduced to almost zero. For this purpose, fully automated microfactories will be developed. To create fully automated microfactories, we propose using arti?cial neural networks having different structures. The simplest perceptron-like neural network can be used at the lowest levels of microfactory control systems. Adaptive Critic Design, based on neural network models of the microfactory objects, can be used for manufacturing process optimization, while associative-projective neural n- works and networks like ART could be used for the highest levels of control systems. We have examined the performance of different neural networks in traditional image recognition tasks and in problems that appear in micromechanical manufacturing. We and our colleagues also have developed an approach to mic- equipment creation in the form of sequential generations. Each subsequent gene- tion must be of a smaller size than the previous ones and must be made by previous generations. Prototypes of ?rst-generation microequipment have been developed and assessed.

The new computing environment enabled by advances in service oriented arc- tectures, mashups, and cloud computing will consist of service spaces comprising data, applications, infrastructure resources distributed over the Web. This envir- ment embraces a holistic paradigm in which users, services, and resources establish on-demand interactions, possibly in real-time, to realise useful experiences. Such interactions obtain relevant services that are targeted to the time and place of the user requesting the service and to the device used to access it. The bene?t of such environment originates from the added value generated by the possible interactions in a large scale rather than by the capabilities of its individual components se- rately. This offers tremendous automation opportunities in a variety of application domains including execution of forecasting, of?ce tasks, travel support, intelligent information gathering and analysis, environment monitoring, healthcare, e-business, community based systems, e-science and e-government. A key feature of this environment is the ability to dynamically compose services to realise user tasks. While recent advances in service discovery, composition and Semantic Web technologies contribute necessary ?rst steps to facilitate this task, the bene?ts of composition are still limited to take advantages of large-scale ubiq- tous environments. The main stream composition techniques and technologies rely on human understanding and manual programming to compose and aggregate s- vices. Recent advances improve composition by leveraging search technologies and ?ow-based composition languages as in mashups and process-centric service c- position.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Workshops held at the 8th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, AIAI 2012, in Halkidiki, Greece, in September 2012. The book includes a total of 66 interesting and innovative research papers from the following 8 workshops: the Second Artificial Intelligence Applications in Biomedicine Workshop (AIAB 2012), the First AI in Education Workshop: Innovations and Applications (AIeIA 2012), the Second International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Software Engineering (CISE 2012), the First Conformal Prediction and Its Applications Workshop (COPA 2012), the First Intelligent Innovative Ways for Video-to-Video Communiccation in Modern Smart Cities Workshop (IIVC 2012), the Third Intelligent Systems for Quality of Life Information Services Workshop (ISQL 2012), the First Mining Humanistic Data Workshop (MHDW 2012), and the First Workshop on Algorithms for Data and Text Mining in Bioinformatics (WADTMB 2012).

Due to the fast growth of the Web and the difficulties in finding desired information, efficient and effective information retrieval systems have become more important than ever, and the search engine has become an essential tool for many people. The ranker, a central component in every search engine, is responsible for the matching between processed queries and indexed documents. Because of its central role, great attention has been paid to the research and development of ranking technologies. In addition, ranking is also pivotal for many other information retrieval applications, such as collaborative filtering, definition ranking, question answering, multimedia retrieval, text summarization, and online advertisement. Leveraging machine learning technologies in the ranking process has led to innovative and more effective ranking models, and eventually to a completely new research area called "learning to rank". Liu first gives a comprehensive review of the major approaches to learning to rank. For each approach he presents the basic framework, with example algorithms, and he discusses its advantages and disadvantages. He continues with some recent advances in learning to rank that cannot be simply categorized into the three major approaches - these include relational ranking, query-dependent ranking, transfer ranking, and semisupervised ranking. His presentation is completed by several examples that apply these technologies to solve real information retrieval problems, and by theoretical discussions on guarantees for ranking performance. This book is written for researchers and graduate students in both information retrieval and machine learning. They will find here the only comprehensive description of the state of the art in a field that has driven the recent advances in search engine development.

Information theory has proved to be effective for solving many computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR) problems (such as image matching, clustering and segmentation, saliency detection, feature selection, optimal classifier design and many others). Nowadays, researchers are widely bringing information theory elements to the CVPR arena. Among these elements there are measures (entropy, mutual information...), principles (maximum entropy, minimax entropy...) and theories (rate distortion theory, method of types...). This book explores and introduces the latter elements through an incremental complexity approach at the same time where CVPR problems are formulated and the most representative algorithms are presented. Interesting connections between information theory principles when applied to different problems are highlighted, seeking a comprehensive research roadmap. The result is a novel tool both for CVPR and machine learning researchers, and contributes to a cross-fertilization of both areas.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Conference on Adaptive and Intelligent Systems, ICAIS 2014, held in Bournemouth, UK, in September 2014. The 19 full papers included in these proceedings together with the abstracts of 4 invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The contributions are organized under the following topical sections: advances in feature selection; clustering and classification; adaptive optimization; advances in time series analysis.