Line drawing interpretation is a challenging area with enormous practical potential. At present, many companies throughout the world invest large amounts of money and human resource in the input of paper drawings into computers. The technology needed to produce an image of a drawing is widely available, but the transformation of these images into more useful forms is an active field of research and development. Machine Interpretation of Line Drawing Images
- describes the theory and practice underlying the computer interpretation of line drawing images and
- shows how line drawing interpretation systems can be developed.
The authors show how many of the problems can be tackled and provide a thorough overview of the processes underpinning the interpretation of images of line drawings.

International Conference on Advances in Pattern Recognition (ICAPR 98) at Plymouth represents an important meeting for advanced research in pattern recognition. There is considerable interest in the areas of image processing, medical imaging, speech recognition, document analysis and character recognition, fuzzy data analysis and neural networks. ICAPR 98 is aimed at providing an international platform for invited research in this multi-disciplinary area. It is expected that the conference will grow in future years to include more research contributions that detail state-of the-art research in pattern recognition. ICAPR 98 attracted contributions from different countries of the highest quality. I should like to thank the programme and organising committee for doing an excellent job in organising this conference. The peer reviewed nature of the conference ensured high quality publications in these proceedings. My personal thanks to Mrs. Barbara Davies who served as conference secretary and worked tirelessly in organising the conference. I thank the organising chair for the local arrangements and our should also key-note, plenary and tutorial speakers for their valuable contributions to the conference. I also thank Springer-Verlag for publishing these proceedings that will be a valuable source of research reference for the readers. Finally, I thank all participants who made this conference successful."

This book uses a mathematical approach to deriving the laws of science and technology, based upon the concept of Fisher information. The approach that follows from these ideas is called the principle of Extreme Physical Information (EPI). The authors show how to use EPI to determine the theoretical input/output laws of unknown systems. Will benefit readers whose math skill is at the level of an undergraduate science or engineering degree.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International ICST Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia, E-Forensics 2010, held in Shanghai, China, in November 2010. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions in total. These, along with 5 papers from a collocated workshop of E-Forensics Law, cover a wide range of topics including digital evidence handling, data carving, records tracing, device forensics, data tamper identification, and mobile device locating.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Mexican Conference on Pattern Recognition, MCPR 2012, held in Huatulco, Mexico, in June 2012. The 31 revised full papers and 3 keynotes presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions and are organized in topical sections on image processing; computer vision and image recognition; pattern recognition and neural networks; and document processing and speech recognition.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2011, held in Derby, UK, in July 2011. The 18 full papers and 4 short papers presented together with 12 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The volume also contains 3 invited talks. ICCS focuses on the useful representation and analysis of conceptual knowledge with research and business applications. It advances the theory and practice in connecting the user's conceptual approach to problem solving with the formal structures that computer applications need to bring their productivity to bear. Conceptual structures (CS) represent a family of approaches that builds on the successes of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, computational linguistics, conceptual modelling, information and Web technologies, user modelling, and knowledge management. Two of the workshops contained in this volume cover CS and knowledge discovery in under-traversed domains and in task specific information retrieval. The third addresses CD in learning, teaching and assessment.

The two volume set LNCS 6854/6855 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2011, which took place in Seville, Spain, August 29-31, 2011. The 138 papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 286 submissions. The papers are organized in topical section on: motion analysis, image and shape models, segmentation and grouping, shape recovery, kernel methods, medical imaging, structural pattern recognition, Biometrics, image and video processing, calibration; and tracking and stereo vision.

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.

The two volume set LNCS 6854/6855 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2011, which took place in Seville, Spain, August 29-31, 2011. The 138 papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 286 submissions. The papers are organized in topical section on: motion analysis, image and shape models, segmentation and grouping, shape recovery, kernel methods, medical imaging, structural pattern recognition, Biometrics, image and video processing, calibration; and tracking and stereo vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, IPMI 2011, held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in July 2011. The 24 full papers and 39 poster papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 224 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on segmentation, statistical methods, shape analysis, registration, diffusion imaging, disease progression modeling, and computer aided diagnosis. The poster sessions deal with segmentation, shape analysis, statistical methods, image reconstruction, microscopic image analysis, computer aided diagnosis, diffusion imaging, functional brain analysis, registration and other related topics.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granular Computing, RSFDGrC 2011, held in Moscow, Russia in June 2011.
The 49 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited and 2 tutorial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 83 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on rough sets and approximations, coverings and granules, fuzzy set models, fuzzy set applications, compound values, feature selection and reduction, clusters and concepts, rules and trees, image processing, and interactions and visualization.

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 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 8th International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR 2011, held in St. Petersburg, Russia in July, 2011. The book presents 30 revised full papers selected from a total of 52 submissions. The book is divided in sections on discrete and continuous optimization, segmentation, motion and video, learning and shape analysis.

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 second volume includes 76 papers organized in topical sections on video and image processing; hybrid artificial neural networks: models, algorithms and data; advances in machine learning for bioinformatics and computational biomedicine; biometric systems for human-machine interaction; data mining in biomedicine; bio-inspired combinatorial optimization; applying evolutionary computation and nature-inspired algorithms to formal methods; recent advances on fuzzy logic and soft computing applications; new advances in theory and applications of ICA-based algorithms; biological and bio-inspired dynamical systems; and interactive and cognitive environments. The last section contains 9 papers from the International Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Context-Based Information Fusion, ISCIF 2011, held at IWANN 2011.

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 volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, IWCIA 2011, held in Madrid, Spain, in May 2011. The 25 revised full papers and 13 poster papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as combinatorial problems in the discrete plane and space related to image analysis; lattice polygons and polytopes; discrete/combinatorial geometry and topology and their use in image analysis; digital geometry of curves and surfaces; tilings and patterns; combinatorial pattern matching; image representation, segmentation, grouping, and reconstruction; methods for image compression; discrete tomography; applications of integer programming, linear programming, and computational geometry to problems of image analysis; parallel architectures and algorithms for image analysis; fuzzy and stochastic image analysis; grammars and models for image or scene analysis and recognition, cellular automata; mathematical morphology and its applications to image analysis; applications in medical imaging, biometrics, and others.

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.

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 Three-Volume-Set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software Engineering and Computer Systems, ICSECS 2011, held in Kuantan, Malaysia, in June 2011. The 190 revised full papers presented together with invited papers in the three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on software engineering; network; bioinformatics and e-health; biometrics technologies; Web engineering; neural network; parallel and distributed e-learning; ontology; image processing; information and data management; engineering; software security; graphics and multimedia; databases; algorithms; signal processing; software design/testing; e- technology; ad hoc networks; social networks; software process modeling; miscellaneous topics in software engineering and computer systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, AIS 2011, held in Burnaby, BC, Canada, in June 2011, colocated with the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, IACIAR 2011.
The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomous and intelligent systems, intelligent and advanced control systems, intelligent sensing and data analysis, human-machine interaction, and intelligent circuit analysis and signal processing.

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 two volume set LNCS 6791 and LNCS 6792 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011.
The 106 revised full or poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. ICANN 2011 had two basic tracks: brain-inspired computing and machine learning research, with strong cross-disciplinary interactions and applications.