It has been traditional in phonetic research to characterize monophthongs using a set of static formant frequencies, i.e., formant frequencies taken from a single time-point in the vowel or averaged over the time-course of the vowel. However, over the last twenty years a growing body of research has demonstrated that, at least for a number of dialects of North American English, vowels which are traditionally described as monophthongs often have substantial spectral change. Vowel inherent spectral change has been observed in speakers' productions, and has also been found to have a substantial effect on listeners' perception. In terms of acoustics, the traditional categorical distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs can be replaced by a gradient description of dynamic spectral patterns. This book includes chapters addressing various aspects of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC), including theoretical and experimental studies of the perceptually relevant aspects of VISC, the relationship between articulation (vocal-tract trajectories) and VISC, historical changes related VISC, cross-dialect, cross-language, and cross-age-group comparisons of VISC, the effects of VISC on second-language speech learning, and the use of VISC in forensic voice comparison.

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable interactions which are natural, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events; investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing; provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE; presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval; examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation; discusses the features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated with CE products for improved user experience. This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find this a useful reference.

Cross disciplinary biometric systems help boost the performance of the conventional systems. Not only is the recognition accuracy significantly improved, but also the robustness of the systems is greatly enhanced in the challenging environments, such as varying illumination conditions. By leveraging the cross disciplinary technologies, face recognition systems, fingerprint recognition systems, iris recognition systems, as well as image search systems all benefit in terms of recognition performance. Take face recognition for an example, which is not only the most natural way human beings recognize the identity of each other, but also the least privacy-intrusive means because people show their face publicly every day. Face recognition systems display superb performance when they capitalize on the innovative ideas across color science, mathematics, and computer science (e.g., pattern recognition, machine learning, and image processing). The novel ideas lead to the development of new color models and effective color features in color science; innovative features from wavelets and statistics, and new kernel methods and novel kernel models in mathematics; new discriminant analysis frameworks, novel similarity measures, and new image analysis methods, such as fusing multiple image features from frequency domain, spatial domain, and color domain in computer science; as well as system design, new strategies for system integration, and different fusion strategies, such as the feature level fusion, decision level fusion, and new fusion strategies with novel similarity measures.

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.

"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.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems, HAIS 2014, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2014. The 61 papers published in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 199 submissions. They are organized in topical sessions on HAIS applications; data mining and knowledge discovery; video and image analysis; bio-inspired models and evolutionary computation; learning algorithms; hybrid intelligent systems for data mining and applications and classification and cluster analysis.

Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity: A Case Study discusses the subject of forensic voice identification and speaker profiling. Specifically focusing on speaker profiling and using dialects of the Hindi language, widely used in India, the authors have contributed to the body of research on speaker identification by using accent feature as the discriminating factor. This case study contributes to the understanding of the speaker identification process in a situation where unknown speech samples are in different language/dialect than the recording of a suspect. The authors' data establishes that vowel quality, quantity, intonation and tone of a speaker as compared to Khariboli (standard Hindi) could be the potential features for identification of dialect accent.

Financial identity theft is well understood with clear underlying motives. Medical identity theft is new and presents a growing problem. The solutions to both problems however, are less clear.

The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft discusses how the digital networked environment is critically different from the world of paper, eyeballs and pens. Many of the effective identity protections are embedded behind the eyeballs, where the presumably passive observer is actually a fairly keen student of human behavior. The emergence of medical identity theft and the implications of medical data privacy are described in the second section of this book.

The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft also presents an overview of the current technology for identity management. The book closes with a series of vignettes in the last chapter, looking at the risks we may see in the future and how these risks can be mitigated or avoided.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Informatics and Technology, ACBIT 2013, held in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, in September 2013. The ??? revised full papers presented together with 14 keynotes and invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers address important problems in medicine, biology and health using image analysis, computer vision, pattern analysis and classification, information visualization, signal processing, control theory, information theory, statistical analysis, information fusion, numerical analysis, fractals and chaos, optimization, simulation and modeling, parallel computing, computational intelligence methods, machine learning, data mining, decision support systems, database integration and management, cognitive modeling, and applied linguistics.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" focuses on theory, methods, and techniques for RKDD, a new sub-field of KDD. It studies the theory and methods to assure the reliability and trustworthiness of discovered knowledge and to maintain the stability and consistency of knowledge discovery processes. RKDD has a broad spectrum of applications, especially in critical domains like medicine, finance, and military.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" also presents methods and techniques for designing robust knowledge-discovery processes. Approaches to assessing the reliability of the discovered knowledge are introduced. Particular attention is paid to methods for reliable feature selection, reliable graph discovery, reliable classification, and stream mining. Estimating the data trustworthiness is covered in this volume as well. Case studies are provided in many chapters.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" is designed for researchers and advanced-level students focused on computer science and electrical engineering as a secondary text or reference. Professionals working in this related field and KDD application developers will also find this book useful.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Chinese Conference on Advances in Image and Graphics Technologies, IGTA 2015, held in Beijing, China, in June 2015. The 50 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 138 submissions. They provide a forum for sharing new aspects of the progresses in the areas of image processing technology, image analysis und understanding, computer vision and pattern recognition, big data mining, computer graphics and VR, image technology application.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third IAPR TC3 Workshop on Pattern Recognition of Social Signals in Human-Computer-Interaction, MPRSS 2014, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2014, as a satellite event of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2014. The 14 revised papers presented focus on pattern recognition, machine learning and information fusion methods with applications in social signal processing, including multimodal emotion recognition, user identification, and recognition of human activities.

This book presents theoretical and practical aspects of the interaction between low and high level image processing. Multiresolution analysis owes its popularity mostly to wavelets and is widely used in a variety of applications. Low level image processing is important for the performance of many high level applications. The book includes examples from different research fields, i.e. video surveillance; biomedical applications (EMG and X-ray); improved communication, namely teleoperation, telemedicine, animation, augmented/virtual reality and robot vision; monitoring of the condition of ship systems and image quality control.

The two-volume set LNCS 8935 and 8936 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2015, held in Sydney, Australia, in January 2015. The 49 revised regular papers, 24 poster presentations, were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. For the three special session, a total of 18 papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The three special sessions are Personal (Big) Data Modeling for Information Access and Retrieval, Social Geo-Media Analytics and Retrieval and Image or video processing, semantic analysis and understanding. In addition, 9 demonstrations and 9 video showcase papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The accepted contributions included in these two volumes represent the state-of-the-art in multimedia modeling research and cover a diverse range of topics including: Image and Video Processing, Multimedia encoding and streaming, applications of multimedia modelling and 3D and augmented reality.

This book presents a thorough and detailed guide to image registration, outlining the principles and reviewing state-of-the-art tools and methods. The book begins by identifying the components of a general image registration system, and then describes the design of each component using various image analysis tools. The text reviews a vast array of tools and methods, not only describing the principles behind each tool and method, but also measuring and comparing their performances using synthetic and real data. Features: discusses similarity/dissimilarity measures, point detectors, feature extraction/selection and homogeneous/heterogeneous descriptors; examines robust estimators, point pattern matching algorithms, transformation functions, and image resampling and blending; covers principal axes methods, hierarchical methods, optimization-based methods, edge-based methods, model-based methods, and adaptive methods; includes a glossary, an extensive list of references, and an appendix on PCA.

"The book is outstanding and admirable in many respects. ... is necessary reading for all kinds of readers from undergraduate students to top authorities in the field." Journal of Symbolic Logic Written by two experts in the field, this is the only comprehensive and unified treatment of the central ideas and applications of Kolmogorov complexity. The book presents a thorough treatment of the subject with a wide range of illustrative applications. Such applications include the randomness of finite objects or infinite sequences, Martin-Loef tests for randomness, information theory, computational learning theory, the complexity of algorithms, and the thermodynamics of computing. It will be ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in computer science, mathematics, cognitive sciences, philosophy, artificial intelligence, statistics, and physics. The book is self-contained in that it contains the basic requirements from mathematics and computer science. Included are also numerous problem sets, comments, source references, and hints to solutions of problems. New topics in this edition include Omega numbers, Kolmogorov-Loveland randomness, universal learning, communication complexity, Kolmogorov's random graphs, time-limited universal distribution, Shannon information and others.

Introduction to Computational Cardiology provides a comprehensive, in-depth treatment of the fundamental concepts and research challenges involved in the mathematical modeling and computer simulation of dynamical processes in the heart, under normal and pathological conditions. About this textbook: - Presents descriptions of models used in both biology and medicine for discovering the mechanisms of heart function and dysfunction on several physiological scales across different species. - Provides several examples throughout the textbook and exercises at the end which facilitate understanding of basic concepts and introduces, for implementation, treated problems to parallel supercomputers. Introduction to Computational Cardiology serves as a secondary textbook or reference book for advanced-level students in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, and cardiac electrophysiology. It is also suitable for researchers employing mathematical modeling and computer simulations of biomedical problems.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR 2015, held in Hong Kong, China, in January 2015. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete and continuous optimization; image restoration and inpainting; segmentation; PDE and variational methods; motion, tracking and multiview reconstruction; statistical methods and learning; and medical image analysis.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the third International Workshop on Symbiotic Interaction, Symbiotic 2014, held in Helsinki, Finland, in October 2014. The 8 full papers and 5 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 16 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: definitions of symbiotic interaction; reviews of implicit interaction; example applications; experimenting with users; and demos and posters.

The Euclidean shortest path (ESP) problem asks the question: what is the path of minimum length connecting two points in a 2- or 3-dimensional space? Variants of this industrially-significant computational geometry problem also require the path to pass through specified areas and avoid defined obstacles.

This unique text/reference reviews algorithms for the exact or approximate solution of shortest-path problems, with a specific focus on a class of algorithms called rubberband algorithms. Discussing each concept and algorithm in depth, the book includes mathematical proofs for many of the given statements. Suitable for a second- or third-year university algorithms course, the text enables readers to understand not only the algorithms and their pseudocodes, but also the correctness proofs, the analysis of time complexities, and other related topics.

Topics and features: provides theoretical and programming exercises at the end of each chapter; presents a thorough introduction to shortest paths in Euclidean geometry, and the class of algorithms called rubberband algorithms; discusses algorithms for calculating exact or approximate ESPs in the plane; examines the shortest paths on 3D surfaces, in simple polyhedrons and in cube-curves; describes the application of rubberband algorithms for solving art gallery problems, including the safari, zookeeper, watchman, and touring polygons route problems; includes lists of symbols and abbreviations, in addition to other appendices.

This hands-on guide will be of interest to undergraduate students in computer science, IT, mathematics, and engineering. Programmers, mathematicians, and engineers dealing with shortest-path problems in practical applications will also find the book a useful resource.

This timely text/reference presents the latest advances in various aspects of social media modeling and social media computing research. Gathering together superb research from a range of established international conferences and workshops, the editors coherently organize and present each of the topics in relation to the basic principles and practices of social media modeling and computing. Individual chapters can be also be used as self-contained references on the material covered. Topics and features: presents contributions from an international selection of preeminent experts in the field; discusses topics on social-media content analysis; examines social-media system design and analysis, and visual analytic tools for event analysis; investigates access control for privacy and security issues in social networks; describes emerging applications of social media, for music recommendation, automatic image annotation, and the analysis and improvement of photo-books.

This book presents a comprehensive treatment of visual analysis of behaviour from computational-modelling and algorithm-design perspectives. Topics: covers learning-group activity models, unsupervised behaviour profiling, hierarchical behaviour discovery, learning behavioural context, modelling rare behaviours, and "man-in-the-loop" active learning; examines multi-camera behaviour correlation, person re-identification, and "connecting-the-dots" for abnormal behaviour detection; discusses Bayesian information criterion, Bayesian networks, "bag-of-words" representation, canonical correlation analysis, dynamic Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixtures, and Gibbs sampling; investigates hidden conditional random fields, hidden Markov models, human silhouette shapes, latent Dirichlet allocation, local binary patterns, locality preserving projection, and Markov processes; explores probabilistic graphical models, probabilistic topic models, space-time interest points, spectral clustering, and support vector machines.

This book presents a different approach to pattern recognition (PR) systems, in which users of a system are involved during the recognition process. This can help to avoid later errors and reduce the costs associated with post-processing. The book also examines a range of advanced multimodal interactions between the machine and the users, including handwriting, speech and gestures. Features: presents an introduction to the fundamental concepts and general PR approaches for multimodal interaction modeling and search (or inference); provides numerous examples and a helpful Glossary; discusses approaches for computer-assisted transcription of handwritten and spoken documents; examines systems for computer-assisted language translation, interactive text generation and parsing, relevance-based image retrieval, and interactive document layout analysis; reviews several full working prototypes of multimodal interactive PR applications, including live demonstrations that can be publicly accessed on the Internet.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der Workshop "Bildverarbeitung fur die Medizin" durch erfolgreiche Veranstaltungen etabliert. Ziel ist auch 2014 wieder die Darstellung aktueller Forschungsergebnisse und die Vertiefung der Gesprache zwischen Wissenschaftlern, Industrie und Anwendern. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes - einige davon in englischer Sprache - umfassen alle Bereiche der medizinischen Bildverarbeitung, insbesondere Bildgebung und -akquisition, Molekulare Bildgebung, Visualisierung und Animation, Bildsegmentierung und -fusion, Anatomische Atlanten, Zeitreihenanalysen, Biomechanische Modellierung, Klinische Anwendung computerunterstutzter Systeme, Validierung und Qualitatssicherung u.v.m.

Mohamed Medhat Gaber "It is not my aim to surprise or shock you - but the simplest way I can summarise is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until - in a visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied" by Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) 1Overview This book suits both graduate students and researchers with a focus on discovering knowledge from scienti c data. The use of computational power for data analysis and knowledge discovery in scienti c disciplines has found its roots with the re- lution of high-performance computing systems. Computational science in physics, chemistry, and biology represents the rst step towards automation of data analysis tasks. The rational behind the developmentof computationalscience in different - eas was automating mathematical operations performed in those areas. There was no attention paid to the scienti c discovery process. Automated Scienti c Disc- ery (ASD) [1-3] represents the second natural step. ASD attempted to automate the process of theory discovery supported by studies in philosophy of science and cognitive sciences. Although early research articles have shown great successes, the area has not evolved due to many reasons. The most important reason was the lack of interaction between scientists and the automating systems.