This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on Nature of Computation and Communication, ICTCC 2014, held in November 2014 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from over 100 submissions. The papers cover formal methods for self-adaptive systems and discuss natural approaches and techniques for computation and communication.

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.

This brief presents a comprehensive introduction to feature coding, which serves as a key module for the typical object recognition pipeline. The text offers a rich blend of theory and practice while reflects the recent developments on feature coding, covering the following five aspects: (1) Review the state-of-the-art, analyzing the motivations and mathematical representations of various feature coding methods; (2) Explore how various feature coding algorithms evolve along years; (3) Summarize the main characteristics of typical feature coding algorithms and categorize them accordingly; (4) Discuss the applications of feature coding in different visual tasks, analyze the influence of some key factors in feature coding with intensive experimental studies; (5) Provide the suggestions of how to apply different feature coding methods and forecast the potential directions for future work on the topic. It is suitable for students, researchers, practitioners interested in object recognition.

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.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Workshop on Biometric Authentication, BIOMET 2014, which was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in June 2014. The 16 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. Additionally, this volume also contains 5 invited papers. The papers cover a range of topics in the field gait and behaviour analysis; iris analysis; speech recognition; 3D ear recognition; face and facial attributes analysis; handwriting and signature recognition; and multimodal and soft biometrics.

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.

A major new professional reference work on fingerprint security systems and technology from leading international researchers in the field. Handbook provides authoritative and comprehensive coverage of all major topics, concepts, and methods for fingerprint security systems. This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators.

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.

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 20th 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 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 contains the extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the 2nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPRAM 2013), held in Barcelona, Spain, from 15 to 18 February, 2013. ICPRAM was organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC) and was held in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The hallmark of this conference was to encourage theory and practice to meet in a single venue. The focus of the book is on contributions describing applications of Pattern Recognition techniques to real-world problems, interdisciplinary research, experimental and/or theoretical studies yielding new insights that advance Pattern Recognition methods.

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 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications, SISAP 2014, held in A Coruna, Spain, in October 2014. The 21 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Improving Similarity Search Methods and Techniques; Indexing and Applications; Metrics and Evaluation; New Scenarios and Approaches; Applications and Specific Domains.

"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.