It is increasingly being recognized that the experimental and theoretical study of the complex system brain requires the cooperation of many disciplines, in cluding biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and others. In this way brain research has become a truly interdis ciplinary endeavor. Indeed, the most important progress is quite often made when different disciplines cooperate. Thus it becomes necessary for scientists to look across the fence surrounding their disciplines. The present book is written precisely in this spirit. It addresses graduate students, professors and scientists in a variety of fields, such as biology, medicine and physics. Be yond its mathematical representation the book gives ample space to verbal and pictorial descriptions of the main and, as I believe, fundamental new insights, so that it will be of interest to a general readership, too. I use this opportunity to thank my former students, some of whom are my present co-workers, for their cooperation over many years. Among them I wish to mention in particular M. Bestehorn, L. Borland, H. Bunz, A. Daf fertshofer, T. Ditzinger, E. Fischer, A. Fuchs, R. Haas, R. Honlinger, V. Jirsa, M. Neufeld, M. Ossig, D. Reimann, M. Schanz, G. Schoner, P. Tass, C. Uhl. My particular thanks go to R. Friedrich and A. Wunderlin for their constant help in many respects. Stimulating discussions with a number of colleagues from a variety of fields are also highly appreciated.

A guide on the use of SVMs in pattern classification, including a rigorous performance comparison of classifiers and regressors. The book presents architectures for multiclass classification and function approximation problems, as well as evaluation criteria for classifiers and regressors. Features: Clarifies the characteristics of two-class SVMs; Discusses kernel methods for improving the generalization ability of neural networks and fuzzy systems; Contains ample illustrations and examples; Includes performance evaluation using publicly available data sets; Examines Mahalanobis kernels, empirical feature space, and the effect of model selection by cross-validation; Covers sparse SVMs, learning using privileged information, semi-supervised learning, multiple classifier systems, and multiple kernel learning; Explores incremental training based batch training and active-set training methods, and decomposition techniques for linear programming SVMs; Discusses variable selection for support vector regressors.

Medical imaging is an important and rapidly expanding area in medical science. Many of the methods employed are essentially digital, for example computerized tomography, and the subject has become increasingly influenced by develop ments in both mathematics and computer science. The mathematical problems have been the concern of a relatively small group of scientists, consisting mainly of applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Their efforts have led to workable algorithms for most imaging modalities. However, neither the fundamentals, nor the limitations and disadvantages of these algorithms are known to a sufficient degree to the physicists, engineers and physicians trying to implement these methods. It seems both timely and important to try to bridge this gap. This book summarizes the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute, on these topics, that was held in the mountains of Tuscany for two weeks in the late summer of 1986. At another (quite different) earlier meeting on medical imaging, the authors noted that each of the speakers had given, there, a long introduction in their general area, stated that they did not have time to discuss the details of the new work, but proceeded to show lots of clinical results, while excluding any mathematics associated with the area.

Data analysis and inference have traditionally been research areas of statistics. However, the need to electronically store, manipulate and analyze large-scale, high-dimensional data sets requires new methods and tools, new types of databases, new efficient algorithms, new data structures, etc. - in effect new computational methods.
This monograph presents new intelligent data management methods and tools, such as the support vector machine, and new results from the field of inference, in particular of causal modeling. In 11 well-structured chapters, leading experts map out the major tendencies and future directions of intelligent data analysis. The book will become a valuable source of reference for researchers exploring the interdisciplinary area between statistics and computer science as well as for professionals applying advanced data analysis methods in industry and commerce. Students and lecturers will find the book useful as an introduction to the area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition, CCBR 2012, held in Guangzhou, China, in December 2012. The 46 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers address the problems in face, iris, hand biometrics, speaker, handwriting, gait, soft biometrics, security and other related topics, and contribute new ideas to research and development of reliable and practical solutions for biometric authentication.

The two-volume set LNCS 6753/6754 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Image and Recognition, ICIAR 2011, held in Burnaby, Canada, in June 2011. The 84 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 147 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and video processing; feature extraction and pattern recognition; computer vision; color, texture, motion and shape; tracking; biomedical image analysis; biometrics; face recognition; image coding, compression and encryption; and 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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing, SEMCCO 2012, held in Bhubaneswar, India, in December 2012. The 96 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 310 initial submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in swarm, evolutionary, memetic and other intelligent computing algorithms and their real world applications in problems selected from diverse domains of science and engineering.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps, WSOM 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on plenaries; financial and societal applications; theory and methodology; applications of data mining and analysis; language processing and document analysis; and visualization and image processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, SSBSE 2012, held in Riva del Garda, Italy in collocation with the 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. The 15 revised full papers, 3 revised short papers, and 2 papers of the graduate track presented together with 2 keynote talks and 1 tutorial paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 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 papers present current research in all areas of Search Based Software Engineering, including theoretical work, research on SBSE applications, empirical studies, and reports on industrial experience.

This two-volume set LNCS 6691 and 6692 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN 2011, held in Torremolinos-M laga, Spain, in June 2011. The 154 revised papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 202 submissions for presentation in two volumes. The first volume includes 69 papers organized in topical sections on mathematical and theoretical methods in computational intelligence; learning and adaptation; bio-inspired systems and neuro-engineering; hybrid intelligent systems; applications of computational intelligence; new applications of brain-computer interfaces; optimization algorithms in graphic processing units; computing languages with bio-inspired devices and multi-agent systems; computational intelligence in multimedia processing; and biologically plausible spiking neural processing.

The two volumes, LNCS 6686 resp. LNCS 6687, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2011, held in La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain, in May/June 2011. The 108 revised full papers presented in LNCS 6686 resp. LNCS 6687 were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The first part, LNCS 6686, entitled "Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation," includes all the contributions mainly related to the methodological, conceptual, formal, and experimental developments in the fields of neurophysiology and cognitive science. The second part, LNCS 6687, entitled "New Challenges on Bioinspired Applications," contains the papers related to bioinspired programming strategies and all the contributions related to the computational solutions to engineering problems in different application domains, specially Health applications, including the CYTED Artificial and Natural Computation for Health'' (CANS) research network papers.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Ergonomics and Health Aspects of Work with Computers, EHAWC 2011, held within the framework of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2011, incorporating 12 thematically similar conferences. A total of 4039 contributions was submitted to HCII 2011, of which 1318 papers were accepted for publication. The 25 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They are organized in topical sections on quality of working life; health and well-being; and interactive devices and interfaces.

Current cameras are poor imitations of the human eye and close descen dants in their design of ideas and a technology that are more than a century old. People in computer vision have traditionally used off-the-shelf cameras that were not meant for the uses they were intended for by these researchers: off-the-shelf cameras are designed to capture images to be printed on paper or looked at on a television screen, not for guiding robots or making 3D models of the environment or even surveilling a large area where very large field of views, high geometric and photometric accuracies are necessary. Quite a significant part of the efforts in computer vision has been targeted at overcoming algorithmically these problems. The authors of this book convince us that it is possible to abandon the traditional route of using standard cameras and to follow the path of designing new cameras explicitly for solving the tasks at hand in computer vision applications. This leads to different design concepts and allows to alleviate many of the difficulties encountered in the processing of the images taken with the "traditional" cameras."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IAPR-TC-15 International Workshop on Graph-Based Representations in Pattern Recognition, GbRPR 2011, held in Munster, Germany, in May 2011.
The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on graph-based representation and characterization, graph matching, classification, and querying, graph-based learning, graph-based segmentation, and applications."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2011, held in St. John's, Canada, in May 2011. The 23 revised full papers presented together with 22 revised short papers and 5 papers from the graduate student symposium were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers cover a broad range of topics presenting original work in all areas of artificial intelligence, either theoretical or applied.

This two-volume set (CCIS 150 and CCIS 151) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications, UCMA 2011, held in Daejeon, Korea, in April 2011. The 86 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 570 submissions. Focusing on various aspects of advances in multimedia applications and ubiquitous computing with computational sciences, mathematics and information technology the papers present current research in the area of multimedia and ubiquitous environment including models and systems, new directions, novel applications associated with the utilization, and acceptance of ubiquitous computing devices and systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first Workshop on Applications of Discrete Geometry and Mathematical Morphology, WADGMM 2010, held at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Istanbul, Turkey, in August 2010. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. The book was specifically designed to promote interchange and collaboration between experts in discrete geometry/mathematical morphology and potential users of these methods from other fields of image analysis and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference, MLDM 2012, held in Berlin, Germany in July 2012. The 51 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 212 submissions. The topics range from theoretical topics for classification, clustering, association rule and pattern mining to specific data mining methods for the different multimedia data types such as image mining, text mining, video mining and web mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2011, held in Montreal, Canada, in June 2011. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 16 short papers and 8 student papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart home and village; health telematics and healthcare technology; wellbeing, ageing friendly and enabling technology; and medical health telematics and healthcare technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2011, held in Torino, Italy, in April 2011. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers present the latest research and discuss current developments and applications in metaheuristics - a paradigm to effectively solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial, economical, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms, and ant colony optimization.

Change detection using remotely sensed images has many applications, such as urban monitoring, land-cover change analysis, and disaster management. This work investigates two-dimensional change detection methods. The existing methods in the literature are grouped into four categories: pixel-based, transformation-based, texture analysis-based, and structure-based. In addition to testing existing methods, four new change detection methods are introduced: fuzzy logic-based, shadow detection-based, local feature-based, and bipartite graph matching-based. The latter two methods form the basis for a structural analysis of change detection. Three thresholding algorithms are compared, and their effects on the performance of change detection methods are measured. These tests on existing and novel change detection methods make use of a total of 35 panchromatic and multi-spectral Ikonos image sets. Quantitative test results and their interpretations are provided.

The two-volume set LNCS 7367 and 7368 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2012, held in Shenyang, China, in July 2012. The 147 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The contributions are structured in topical sections on mathematical modeling; neurodynamics; cognitive neuroscience; learning algorithms; optimization; pattern recognition; vision; image processing; information processing; neurocontrol; and novel applications.

This volume proceedings contains revised selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence, AICI 2012, held in Chengdu, China, in October 2012. The total of 163 high-quality papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 724 submissions. The papers are organized into topical sections on applications of artificial intelligence, applications of computational intelligence, data mining and knowledge discovery, evolution strategy, expert and decision support systems, fuzzy computation, information security, intelligent control, intelligent image processing, intelligent information fusion, intelligent signal processing, machine learning, neural computation, neural networks, particle swarm optimization, and pattern recognition.