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.

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)."

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.

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.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Forum on Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communication, IFTC 2012, Shanghai, China, November. The 69 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image processing and pattern recognition; image and video analysis; image quality assessment; text image and speech processing; content retrieval and security; source coding; multimedia communication; new advances in broadband multimedia; human computer interface; 3D video.

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.

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 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.

In a world of almost permanent and rapidly increasing electronic data availability, techniques of filtering, compressing, and interpreting this data to transform it into valuable and easily comprehensible information is of utmost importance. One key topic in this area is the capability to deduce future system behavior from a given data input.

This book brings together for the first time the complete theory of data-based neurofuzzy modelling and the linguistic attributes of fuzzy logic in a single cohesive mathematical framework. After introducing the basic theory of data-based modelling, new concepts including extended additive and multiplicative submodels are developed and their extensions to state estimation and data fusion are derived. All these algorithms are illustrated with benchmark and real-life examples to demonstrate their efficiency.

Chris Harris and his group have carried out pioneering work which has tied together the fields of neural networks and linguistic rule-based algortihms. This book is aimed at researchers and scientists in time series modeling, empirical data modeling, knowledge discovery, data mining, and data fusion.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN VIETRI-Ol, jointly organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies "Eduardo R. Caianiello" (IIASS), the Societa Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN), the IEEE NNC Italian RIG and the Italian SIG of the INNS. Following the tradition of previous years, we invited three foreign scientists to the workshop, Dr. G. Indiveri and Professors A. Roy and R. Sun, who respectively presented the lectures "Computation in Neuromorphic Analog VLSI Systems", "On Connectionism and Rule Extraction", "Beyond Simple Rule Extraction: Acquiring Planning Knowledge from Neural Networks" (the last two papers being part of the special session mentioned below). In addition, a review talk was presented, dealing with a very up-to-date topic: "NeuroJuzzy Approximator based on Mamdani's Model". A large part of the book contains original contributions approved by referees as oral or poster presentations, which have been assembled for reading convenience into three sections: Architectures and Algorithms, Image and Signal Processing, and Applications. The last part of the books contains the papers of the special Session "From Synapses to Rules". Our thanks go to Prof. B. Apolloni, who organized this section. Furthermore, two sections are dedicated to the memory of two great scientists who were friends in life, Professors Mark Aizerman and Eduardo R. Caianiello. The editors would like to thank the invited speakers, the review lecturers and all the contributors whose highly qualified papers helped with the success of the workshop.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, PRIB 2012, held in Tokyo, Japan, in November 2012. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. Their topics are widely ranging from fundamental techniques, sequence analysis to biological network analysis. The papers are organized in topical sections on generic methods, visualization, image analysis, and platforms, applications of pattern recognition techniques, protein structure and docking, complex data analysis, and sequence analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence, AICI 2012, held in Chengdu, China, in October 2012. The 163 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 724 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications of artificial intelligence; applications of computational intelligence; data mining and knowledge discovering; evolution strategy; intelligent image processing; machine learning; neural networks; pattern recognition.

This book is a collection of several tutorials from the EUROGRAPHICS '90 conference in Montreux. The conference was held under the motto "IMAGES: Synthesis, Analysis and Interaction", and the tutorials, partly presented in this volume, reflect the conference theme. As such, this volume provides a unique collection of advanced texts on 'traditional' com puter graphics as well as of tutorials on image processing and image reconstruction. As with all the volumes of the series "Advances in Computer Graphics", the contributors are leading experts in their respective fields. The chapter Design and Display of Solid Models provides an extended introduction to interactive graphics techniques for design, fast display, and high-quality rendering of solid models. The text focuses on techniques for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). The follow ing topics are treated in depth: interactive design techniques (specification of curves, surfaces and solids; graphical user interfaces; procedural languages and direct manipulation) and display techniques (depth-buffer, scan-line and ray-tracing techniques; CSG classification techniques; efficiency-improving methods; software and hardware implementations).

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.

Pattern recognition presents one of the most significant challenges for scientists and engineers, and many different approaches have been proposed. The aim of this book is to provide a self-contained account of probabilistic analysis of these approaches. The book includes a discussion of distance measures, nonparametric methods based on kernels or nearest neighbors, Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory, epsilon entropy, parametric classification, error estimation, free classifiers, and neural networks. Wherever possible, distribution-free properties and inequalities are derived. A substantial portion of the results or the analysis is new. Over 430 problems and exercises complement the material.

The development of effective methods for the prediction of ontological annotations is an important goal in computational biology, yet evaluating their performance is difficult due to problems caused by the structure of biomedical ontologies and incomplete annotations of genes. This work proposes an information-theoretic framework to evaluate the performance of computational protein function prediction. A Bayesian network is used, structured according to the underlying ontology, to model the prior probability of a protein's function. The concepts of misinformation and remaining uncertainty are then defined, that can be seen as analogs of precision and recall. Finally, semantic distance is proposed as a single statistic for ranking classification models. The approach is evaluated by analyzing three protein function predictors of gene ontology terms. The work addresses several weaknesses of current metrics, and provides valuable insights into the performance of protein function prediction tools.

This book comprises the refereed proceedings of the International Conferences, SIP, WSE, and ICHCI 2012, held in conjunction with GST 2012 on Jeju Island, Korea, in November/December 2012. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and focus on the various aspects of signal processing, image processing, and pattern recognition, and Web science and engineering, and human computer interaction.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, SSBSE 2013, held in St. Petersburg, Russia. The 14 revised full papers, 6 revised short papers, and 6 papers of the graduate track presented together with 2 keynotes, 2 challenge track papers and 1 tutorial paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 initial submissions. Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) studies the application of meta-heuristic optimization techniques to various software engineering problems, ranging from requirements engineering to software testing and maintenance.

The three volume set LNCS 7583, 7584 and 7585 comprises the Workshops and Demonstrations which took place in connection with the European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2012, held in Firenze, Italy, in October 2012. The total of 179 workshop papers and 23 demonstration papers was carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. They where held at workshops with the following themes: non-rigid shape analysis and deformable image alignment; visual analysis and geo-localization of large-scale imagery; Web-scale vision and social media; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; re-identification; biological and computer vision interfaces; where computer vision meets art; consumer depth cameras for computer vision; unsolved problems in optical flow and stereo estimation; what's in a face?; color and photometry in computer vision; computer vision in vehicle technology: from earth to mars; parts and attributes; analysis and retrieval of tracked events and motion in imagery streams; action recognition and pose estimation in still images; higher-order models and global constraints in computer vision; information fusion in computer vision for concept recognition; 2.5D sensing technologies in motion: the quest for 3D; benchmarking facial image analysis technologies.

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.

Roboticsis undergoingamajortransformationinscopeanddimension.From a largelydominantindustrialfocus,roboticsis rapidly expandinginto human environments and vigorouslyengaged in its new challenges. Interacting with, assisting, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will - creasingly touch people and their lives. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across - verse research areas and scienti?c disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are pr- ing an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the ?eld of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. TheSpringerTractsinAdvancedRobotics(STAR)isdevotedtobringingto the research community the latest advances in the robotics ?eld on the basis of their signi?cance and quality. Through a wide and timely dissemination of critical research developments in robotics, our objective with this series is to promotemoreexchangesandcollaborationsamongtheresearchersinthec- munity and contributeto further advancements inthis rapidlygrowing?eld. The monographwritten byAlejandro DizanVasquez Goveafocusesonthe practicalproblem of moving in a cluttered environment with pedestrians and vehicles. A frameworkbased on Hidden Markov models is developed to learn typical motion patterns which can be used to predict motion on the basis of sensor data. All the theoretical results have been implemented and validated with experiments, using both real and simulated data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PReMI 2013, held in Kolkata, India in December 2013. The 101 revised papers presented together with 9 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pattern recognition; machine learning; image processing; speech and video processing; medical imaging; document image processing; soft computing; bioinformatics and computational biology; and social media mining.

The three-volume set LNCS 7510, 7511, and 7512 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2012, held in Nice, France, in October 2012. Based on rigorous peer reviews, the program committee carefully selected 252 revised papers from 781 submissions for presentation in three volumes. The first volume includes 91 papers organized in topical sections on abdominal imaging, computer-assisted interventions and robotics; computer-aided diagnosis and planning; image reconstruction and enhancement; analysis of microscopic and optical images; computer-assisted interventions and robotics; image segmentation; cardiovascular imaging; and brain imaging: structure, function and disease evolution.

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.