We describe in this book, bio-inspired models and applications of hybrid intel- gent systems using soft computing techniques for image analysis and pattern r- ognition based on biometrics and other information sources. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of classification methods and applications, which are basically papers that propose new models for classification to solve general pr- lems and applications. The second part contains papers with the main theme of modular neural networks in pattern recognition, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques, like modular neural networks, for achieving pattern r- ognition based on biometric measures. The third part contains papers with the theme of bio-inspired optimization methods and applications to diverse problems. The fourth part contains papers that deal with general theory and algorithms of bio-inspired methods, like neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. The fifth part contains papers on computer vision applications of soft computing methods. In the part of classification methods and applications there are 5 papers that - scribe different contributions on fuzzy logic and bio-inspired models with appli- tion in classification for medical images and other data.

Brain imaging brings together the technology, methodology, research questions and approaches of a wide range of scientific fields including physics, statistics, computer science, neuroscience, biology, and engineering. Thus, methodological and technological advances that enable us to obtain measurements, examine relationships across observations, and link these data to neuroscientific hypotheses happen in a highly interdisciplinary environment. The dynamic field of machine learning with its modern approach to data mining provides many relevant approaches for neuroscience and enables the exploration of open questions. This state-of-the-art survey offers a collection of papers from the Workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging, MLINI 2011, held at the 25th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing, NIPS 2011, in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, in December 2011. Additionally, invited speakers agreed to contribute reviews on various aspects of the field, adding breadth and perspective to the volume. The 32 revised papers were carefully selected from 48 submissions. At the interface between machine learning and neuroimaging the papers aim at shedding some light on the state of the art in this interdisciplinary field. They are organized in topical sections on coding and decoding, neuroscience, dynamcis, connectivity, and probabilistic models and machine learning.

This book contains the Proceedings of the US-Japan Seminar on Learning Process in Control Systems. The seminar, held in Nagoya, Japan, from August 18 to 20, 1970, was sponsored by the US-Japan Cooperative Science Program, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The full texts of all the presented papers except two t are included. The papers cover a great variety of topics related to learning processes and systems, ranging from pattern recognition to systems identification, from learning control to biological modelling. In order to reflect the actual content of the book, the present title was selected. All the twenty-eight papers are roughly divided into two parts--Pattern Recognition and System Identification and Learning Process and Learning Control. It is sometimes quite obvious that some papers can be classified into either part. The choice in these cases was strictly the editor's in order to keep a certain balance between the two parts. During the past decade there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition and machine learn ing. In designing an optimal pattern recognition or control system, if all the a priori information about the process under study is known and can be described deterministically, the optimal system is usually designed by deterministic optimization techniques."

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multimedia and Signal Processing, CMSP 2012, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2012. The 79 full papers included in the volume were selected from 328 submissions from 10 different countries and regions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer and machine vision, feature extraction, image enhancement and noise filtering, image retrieval, image segmentation, imaging techniques & 3D imaging, pattern recognition, multimedia systems, architecture, and applications, visualization, signal modeling, identification & prediction, speech & language processing, time-frequency signal analysis.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Manufacturing, IRAM 2012, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November 2012. The 64 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: mobile robots, intelligent autonomous systems, robot vision and robust, autonomous agents, micro, meso and nano-scale automation and assembly, flexible manufacturing systems, CIM and micro-machining, and fabrication techniques.

Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information. The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop brought together researchers in the respective technologies on the one hand, and mathematicians and statisticians on the other hand, for an intensive week of cross-fertilization. There is a long history of benefit from introducing mathematical techniques and ideas to speech and language technologies. Examples include the source-channel paradigm, hidden Markov models, decision trees, exponential models and formal languages theory. It is likely that new mathematical techniques, or novel applications of existing techniques, will once again prove pivotal for moving the field forward. This volume consists of original contributions presented by participants during the two workshops. Topics include language modeling, prosody, acoustic-phonetic modeling, and statistical methodology.

The two volumes set, CCIS 383 and 384, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks, EANN 2013, held on Halkidiki, Greece, in September 2013. The 91 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers describe the applications of artificial neural networks and other soft computing approaches to various fields such as pattern recognition-predictors, soft computing applications, medical applications of AI, fuzzy inference, evolutionary algorithms, classification, learning and data mining, control techniques-aspects of AI evolution, image and video analysis, classification, pattern recognition, social media and community based governance, medical applications of AI-bioinformatics and learning.

Biometrics in dermatology is an essential tool where data evaluation results in valid interpretations. This book will be the first in this area. One part of the book will describe principal aspects of dermatological research focussing on practical advice. A special part will cover applied biometrics to provide the clinician and researcher with state-of-the-art guidelines to assess the severity of common skin diseases. An additional aspect that will be of interest to pharmacologists addresses pharmacologic assays.

Soft computing comprises various paradigms dedicated to approximately solving real-world problems, e.g. in decision making, classification or learning; among these paradigms are fuzzy sets, rough sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and others.

It is well understood now in the soft computing community that hybrid approaches combining various paradigms are very promising approaches for solving complex problems. Exploiting the potential and strength of both neural networks and rough sets, this book is devoted to rough-neuro computing which is also related to the novel aspect of computing based on information granulation, in particular to computing with words. It provides foundational and methodological issues as well as applications in various fields.

Depth recovery is important in machine vision applications when a 3-dimensional structure must be derived from 2-dimensional images. This is an active area of research with applications ranging from industrial robotics to military imaging. This book provides the comprehensive details of the methodology, along with the complete mathematics and algorithms involved. Many new models, both deterministic and statistical, are introduced.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2012, held in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, in November 2012. The 32 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions and are presented with 4 plenary talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on aggregation operators, integrals, data privacy and security, reasoning, applications, and clustering and similarity.

he problem of analyzing sequences of images to extract three-dimensional T motion and structure has been at the heart of the research in computer vi sion for many years. It is very important since its success or failure will determine whether or not vision can be used as a sensory process in reactive systems. The considerable research interest in this field has been motivated at least by the following two points: 1. The redundancy of information contained in time-varying images can over come several difficulties encountered in interpreting a single image. 2. There are a lot of important applications including automatic vehicle driv ing, traffic control, aerial surveillance, medical inspection and global model construction. However, there are many new problems which should be solved: how to effi ciently process the abundant information contained in time-varying images, how to model the change between images, how to model the uncertainty inherently associated with the imaging system and how to solve inverse problems which are generally ill-posed. There are of course many possibilities for attacking these problems and many more remain to be explored. We discuss a few of them in this book based on work carried out during the last five years in the Computer Vision and Robotics Group at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique)."

The Distinguished Dissertation Series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This book investigates how information contained in multiple, overlapping images of a scene may be combined to produce images of superior quality. This offers possibilities such as noise reduction, extended field of view, blur removal, increased spatial resolution and improved dynamic range. Potential applications cover fields as diverse as forensic video restoration, remote sensing, video compression and digital video editing.The book covers two aspects that have attracted particular attention in recent years: image mosaicing, whereby multiple images are aligned to produce a large composite; and super-resolution, which permits restoration at an increased resolution of poor quality video sequences by modelling and removing imaging degradations including noise, blur and spacial-sampling. It contains a comprehensive coverage and analysis of existing techniques, and describes in detail novel, powerful and automatic algorithms (based on a robust, statistical framework) for applying mosaicing and super-resolution. The algorithms may be implemented directly from the descriptions given here. A particular feature of the techniques is that it is not necessary to know the camera parameters (such as position and focal length) in order to apply them. Throughout the book, examples are given on real image sequences, covering a variety of applications including: the separation of latent marks in forensic images; the automatic creation of 360 panoramic mosaics; and super-resolution restoration of various scenes, text, and faces in lw-quality video.

This volume contains a selection of revised papers that were presented at the Software Aspects of Robotic Systems, SARS 2011 Workshop and the Machine Learning for System Construction, MLSC 2011 Workshop, held during October 17-18 in Vienna, Austria, under the auspices of the International Symposium Series on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation, ISoLA. The topics covered by the papers of the SARS and the MLSC workshop demonstrate the breadth and the richness of the respective fields of the two workshops stretching from robot programming to languages and compilation techniques, to real-time and fault tolerance, to dependability, software architectures, computer vision, cognitive robotics, multi-robot-coordination, and simulation to bio-inspired algorithms, and from machine learning for anomaly detection, to model construction in software product lines to classification of web service interfaces. In addition the SARS workshop hosted a special session on the recently launched KOROS project on collaborating robot systems that is borne by a consortium of researchers of the faculties of architecture and planning, computer science, electrical engineering and information technology, and mechanical and industrial engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. The four papers devoted to this session highlight important research directions pursued in this interdisciplinary research project.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, CIBB 2011, held in Gargnano del Garda, Italy, in June/July 2011. The 19 papers, presented together with 2 keynote speeches, were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on statistical learning, genomics, computational intelligence for health at the edge, proteomics, intelligent clinical decision support systems (i-CDSS), bioinformatics, and data clustering.

Action recognition technology has many real-world applications in human-computer interaction, surveillance, video retrieval, retirement home monitoring, and robotics. The commoditization of depth sensors has also opened up further applications that were not feasible before. This text focuses on feature representation and machine learning algorithms for action recognition from depth sensors. After presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, the authors then provide in-depth descriptions of their recently developed feature representations and machine learning techniques, including lower-level depth and skeleton features, higher-level representations to model the temporal structure and human-object interactions, and feature selection techniques for occlusion handling. This work enables the reader to quickly familiarize themselves with the latest research, and to gain a deeper understanding of recently developed techniques. It will be of great use for both researchers and practitioners.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IBERAMIA 2012, held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in November 2012. The 75 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 170 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, information and knowledge processing, knowledge discovery and data mining, machine learning, bio-inspired computing, fuzzy systems, modelling and simulation, ambient intelligence, multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, computer vision and robotics, planning and scheduling, AI in education, and knowledge engineering and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2012, held in Oxford, UK, in December 2012. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers are written by leading scientists involved in research and development of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and beyond; with a special focus on humanoid robotics and AGI, cognitive robotics, creativity and AGI, the future evolution of advanced AGIs, and the dynamics of AGI goal systems.

Image processing and machine vision are fields of renewed interest in the commercial market. People in industry, managers, and technical engineers are looking for new technologies to move into the market. Many of the most promising developments are taking place in the field of image processing and its applications. The book offers a broad coverage of advances in a range of topics in image processing and machine vision.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, IWCIA 2012, held in Austin, TX, USA in November 2012. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The topics covered include digital geometry, combinatorics in digital spaces, digital curves and surfaces; digital topologyl grammars, transformation, applications; grammars and models in image analysis; picture transformations, morphologic operations, image segmentation; and discrete tomography, applications.

The five volume set LNCS 7663, LNCS 7664, LNCS 7665, LNCS 7666 and LNCS 7667 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2012, held in Doha, Qatar, in November 2012. The 423 regular session papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. These papers cover all major topics of theoretical research, empirical study and applications of neural information processing research. The 5 volumes represent 5 topical sections containing articles on theoretical analysis, neural modeling, algorithms, applications, as well as simulation and synthesis.

The five volume set LNCS 7663, LNCS 7664, LNCS 7665, LNCS 7666 and LNCS 7667 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2012, held in Doha, Qatar, in November 2012. The 423 regular session papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. These papers cover all major topics of theoretical research, empirical study and applications of neural information processing research. The 5 volumes represent 5 topical sections containing articles on theoretical analysis, neural modeling, algorithms, applications, as well as simulation and synthesis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Advanced Machine Learning Technologies and Applications, AMLTA 2012, held in Cairo, Egypt, in December 2012. The 58 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 intial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on rough sets and applications, machine learning in pattern recognition and image processing, machine learning in multimedia computing, bioinformatics and cheminformatics, data classification and clustering, cloud computing and recommender systems.

The book presents research work on face recognition using edge information as features for face recognition with ICA algorithms. The independent components are extracted from edge information. These independent components are used with classifiers to match the facial images for recognition purpose. In their study, authors have explored Canny and LOG edge detectors as standard edge detection methods. Oriented Laplacian of Gaussian (OLOG) method is explored to extract the edge information with different orientations of Laplacian pyramid. Multiscale wavelet model for edge detection is also proposed to extract edge information. The book provides insights for advance research work in the area of image processing and biometrics.

Representations of humans in virtual environments are called Avatars. This book brings together work from a variety of relevant disciplines to detail how humans interact in computer-generated environments. It contains contributions from several key people in the field, including Microsoft Researchs Virtual World Group, and presents their findings in a way that is accessible to readers who are new to the field. Coverage details Internet-based virtual worlds that have been widely used by the public as well as networked VR systems that have been primarily used in pilot studies and research.