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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Background subtraction is a widely used concept for detection of moving objects in videos. In the last two decades there has been a lot of development in designing algorithms for background subtraction, as well as wide use of these algorithms in various important applications, such as visual surveillance, sports video analysis, motion capture, etc. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to model scene backgrounds. The concept of background subtraction also has been extended to detect objects from videos captured from moving cameras. This book reviews the concept and practice of background subtraction. We discuss several traditional statistical background subtraction models, including the widely used parametric Gaussian mixture models and non-parametric models. We also discuss the issue of shadow suppression, which is essential for human motion analysis applications. This book discusses approaches and tradeoffs for background maintenance. This book also reviews many of the recent developments in background subtraction paradigm. Recent advances in developing algorithms for background subtraction from moving cameras are described, including motion-compensation-based approaches and motion-segmentation-based approaches. For links to the videos to accompany this book, please see sites.google.com/a/morganclaypool.com/backgroundsubtraction/ Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Figure Credits / Object Detection and Segmentation in Videos / Background Subtraction from a Stationary Camera / Background Subtraction from a Moving Camera / Bibliography / Author's Biography

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.

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 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 19th International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in November 2014. The 23 revised full papers, 3 short papers, and 8 workshop papers presented at the international track of the conference were carefully reviewed and selected from overall 93 submissions to the international track, domestic track, and international workshops for inclusion in this volume. The papers feature original research results and practical development experiences among researchers and application developers from the many AI related areas including machine learning, data mining, statistics, computer vision, web intelligence, information retrieval, and computer games.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2014, held in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, in November 2014. The 115 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image coding, processing and analysis; segmentation, analysis of shape and texture; analysis of signal, speech and language; document processing and recognition; feature extraction, clustering and classification; pattern recognition and machine learning; neural networks for pattern recognition; computer vision and robot vision; video segmentation and tracking.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology, RSKT 2014, held in Shanghai, China, in October 2014. The 70 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 submissions. The papers in this volume cover topics such as foundations and generalizations of rough sets, attribute reduction and feature selection, applications of rough sets, intelligent systems and applications, knowledge technology, domain-oriented data-driven data mining, uncertainty in granular computing, advances in granular computing, big data to wise decisions, rough set theory, and three-way decisions, uncertainty, and granular computing.

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).

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 comprehensive and authoritative text/reference presents a unique, multidisciplinary perspective on Shape Perception in Human and Computer Vision. Rather than focusing purely on the state of the art, the book provides viewpoints from world-class researchers reflecting broadly on the issues that have shaped the field. Drawing upon many years of experience, each contributor discusses the trends followed and the progress made, in addition to identifying the major challenges that still lie ahead. Topics and features: examines each topic from a range of viewpoints, rather than promoting a specific paradigm; discusses topics on contours, shape hierarchies, shape grammars, shape priors, and 3D shape inference; reviews issues relating to surfaces, invariants, parts, multiple views, learning, simplicity, shape constancy and shape illusions; addresses concepts from the historically separate disciplines of computer vision and human vision using the same "language" and methods.

This book constitutes the first part of the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Life System Modeling and Simulation, LSMS 2014, and of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing for Sustainable Energy and Environment, ICSEE 2014, held in Shanghai, China, in September 2014. The 159 revised full papers presented in the three volumes of CCIS 461-463 were carefully reviewed and selected from 572 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on biomedical signal processing, imaging, and visualization; computational methods and intelligence in modeling genetic and chemical networks and regulation; computational methods and intelligence in organism modeling; computational methods and intelligence in modeling and design of synthetic biological systems; computational methods and intelligence in biomechanical systems, tissue engineering and clinical bioengineering; intelligent medical apparatus and clinical applications; modeling and simulation of societies and collective behaviour; innovative education in systems modeling and simulation; data analysis and data mining of biosignals; feature selection; robust optimization and data analysis.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2014, held in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2014. The 19 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. They deal with the theory and tools for modeling decisions, as well as applications that encompass decision making processes and information fusion techniques and are organized in topical sections on aggregation operators and decision making, optimization, clustering and similarity, and data mining and data privacy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Bayesian and grAphical Models for Biomedical Imaging, BAMBI 2014, held in Cambridge, MA, USA, in September 2014 as a satellite event of the 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2014. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions with a key aspect on probabilistic modeling applied to medical image analysis. The objectives of this workshop compared to other workshops, e.g. machine learning in medical imaging, have a stronger mathematical focus on the foundations of probabilistic modeling and inference. The papers highlight the potential of using Bayesian or random field graphical models for advancing scientific research in biomedical image analysis or for the advancement of modeling and analysis of medical imaging data.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision and Graphics, ICCVG 2014, held in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2014. The 81 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. They cover various important aspects of computer vision and graphics.

This three-volume set LNAI 8724, 8725 and 8726 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2014, held in Nancy, France, in September 2014. The 115 revised research papers presented together with 13 demo track papers, 10 nectar track papers, 8 PhD track papers, and 9 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 550 submissions. The papers cover the latest high-quality interdisciplinary research results in all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases.