INSTICC organized the third edition of VISIGRAPP that took place in Funchal- Madeira, Portugal in January 2008 after successful previous editions. This book - cludes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2008, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and Computer Graphics Theory and - plications (GRAPP). The conference was intended to stimulate the exchange of ideas on the topics of c- puter vision and computer graphics. We received a high number of paper submissions: 374 in total for both conferences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 20 were selected for this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from the ones that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee Members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2008 also featured the comments of keynote speakers, in alphabetical order, Adrian Hilton (University of Surrey, UK), Genevieve Lucet (Computer S- vices for Research at the UNAM, Mexico), Peter Sturm (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France) and Sharathchandra Pankanti (IBM - Exploratory Computer Vision Group, USA), who are internationally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an - portant contribution to the overall quality of the conference.

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors wereable to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2008, held in Havana, Cuba, in September 2008.

The 93 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on signal analysis for characterization and filtering, analysis of shape and texture, analysis of speech and language, data mining, clustering of images and documents, statistical pattern recognition, classification and description of objects, classification and edition, geometric image analysis, neural networks, computer vision, image coding, associative memories and neural networks, interpolation and video tracking, images analysis, music and speech analysis, as well as classifier combination and document filtering.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

The Second International Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia (e-Forensics 2009) took place in Adelaide, South Australia during January 19-21, 2009, at the Australian National Wine Centre, University of Adelaide. In addition to the peer-reviewed academic papers presented in this volume, the c- ference featured a significant number of plenary contributions from recognized - tional and international leaders in digital forensic investigation. Keynote speaker Andy Jones, head of security research at British Telecom, outlined the emerging challenges of investigation as new devices enter the market. These - clude the impact of solid-state memory, ultra-portable devices, and distributed storage - also known as cloud computing. The plenary session on Digital Forensics Practice included Troy O'Malley, Que- sland Police Service, who outlined the paperless case file system now in use in Que- sland, noting that efficiency and efficacy gains in using the system have now meant that police can arrive at a suspect's home before the suspect! Joseph Razik, represe- ing Patrick Perrot of the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nati- ale, France, summarized research activities in speech, image, video and multimedia at the IRCGN. The plenary session on The Interaction Between Technology and Law brought a legal perspective to the technological challenges of digital forensic investigation.

The Second Annual Workshop on Privacy and Security, organized by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Privacy and Security of the School of C- munication and Information at Rutgers University, was held on May 12, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. A few of the papers in this volume were produced through a multi-step process. First, we recorded the talk given by each author at the workshop in May 2008. Next, we transcribed the recording. The authors then produced a draft of their paper from these transcriptions, refining each draft until the final version. Although the papers are not verbatim transcriptions of the talks given, some do retain the informal and conv- sational quality of the presentations. In one instance we have included some material from the question-and-answer period after the talk, since the material covered proved to be relevant and interesting. The majority of authors, however, preferred to include a more formal paper based on the material presented at the workshop.

The 2009 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Int- ligence (AICI 2009) was held during November 7-8, 2009 in Shanghai, China. The technical program of the conference reflects the tremendous growth in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence with contributions from a large number of participants around the world. AICI 2009 received 1,203 submissions from 20 countries and regions. After rig- ous reviews, 79 high-quality papers were selected for this volume, representing an acceptance rate of 6.6%. These selected papers cover many new developments and their applications in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. Their publications reflect a sustainable interest from the wide academic community worldwide in tirelessly pursuing new solutions through effective utilizations of arti- cial intelligence and computational intelligence to real-world problems. We would like to specially thank all the committee members and reviewers, without whose timely help it would have been impossible to review all the submitted papers to assemble this program. We also would like take this opportunity to express our heartfelt appreciation for all those who worked together in organizing this conference, establi- ing the technical programs and running the conference meetings. We greatly appreciate the authors, speakers, invited session organizers, session Chairs, and others who made this conference possible. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the Shanghai University of Electric Power for the sponsorship and support of the conference.

This Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF 2008), held August 7-8, 2008. It was a great honor for the organizers to host this scienti?c event at the renowned National Academy of Sciences: Keck Center in Washington, DC, USA. Computational Forensics is an emerging research domain focusing on the investigation of forensic problems using computational methods. Its primary goalis the discoveryand advancement of forensicknowledgeinvolving modeling, computer simulation, and computer-based analysis and recognition in studying and solving forensic problems. The Computational Forensics workshop series is intended as a forum for researchers and practitioners in all areas of computational and forensic sciences. This forum discusses current challenges in computer-assisted forensic investi- tions and presents recent progress and advances. IWCF addresses a broad spectrum of forensic disciplines that use computer tools for criminal investigation. This year's edition covers presentations on c- putational methods for individuality studies, computer-based3D processing and analysis of skulls and human bodies, shoe print preprocessing and analysis, n- ural language analysis and information retrieval to support law enforcement, analysis and group visualization of speech recordings, scanner and print device forensics, and computer-based questioned document and signature analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2009, held in Bordeaux, France in September/October 2009.

The 43 revised full papers and 25 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on technovision, fundamental mathematical techniques, image processing, coding and filtering, image and video analysis, computer vision, tracking, color, multispectral and special-purpose imaging, medical imaging, and biometrics.

This series constitutes a collection of selected papers presented at the International Conference on Medical Imaging and Informatics (MIMI2007), held during August 14-16, in Beijing, China. The conference, the second of its kind, was funded by the European Commission (EC) under the Asia IT&C programme and was co-organized by Middlesex University, UK and Capital University of Medical Sciences, China. The aim of the conference was to initiate links between Asia and Europe and to exchange research results and ideas in the field of medical imaging. A wide range of topics were covered during the conference that attracted an audience from 18 countries/regions (Canada, China, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Libya, Macao, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the USA). From about 110 submitted papers, 50 papers were selected for oral presentations, and 20 for posters. Six key-note speeches were delivered during the conference presenting the state of the art of medical informatics. Two workshops were also organized covering the topics of "Legal, Ethical and Social Issues in Medical Imaging" and "Informatics" and "Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD)," respectively.

On behalf of the Program Committee, it is our pleasure to present the p- ceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection systems (RAID 2009),which took place in Saint-Malo,France, during September 23-25. As in the past, the symposium brought together leading - searchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to discuss intrusion detection research and practice. There were six main sessions prese- ingfullresearchpapersonanomalyandspeci?cation-basedapproaches,malware detection and prevention, network and host intrusion detection and prevention, intrusion detection for mobile devices, and high-performance intrusion det- tion. Furthermore, there was a poster session on emerging research areas and case studies. The RAID 2009ProgramCommittee received59 full paper submissionsfrom all over the world. All submissions were carefully reviewed by independent - viewers on the basis of space, topic, technical assessment, and overall balance. The ?nal selection took place at the Program Committee meeting on May 21 in Oakland, California. In all, 17 papers were selected for presentation and p- lication in the conference proceedings. As a continued feature, the symposium accepted submissions for poster presentations which have been published as - tended abstracts, reporting early-stage research, demonstration of applications, or case studies. Thirty posters were submitted for a numerical review by an independent, three-person sub-committee of the Program Committee based on novelty, description, and evaluation. The sub-committee recommended the - ceptance of 16 of these posters for presentation and publication. The success of RAID 2009 depended on the joint e?ort of many people.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-workshop proceedings of two co-located events: the Second International Workshop on Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships, CLEAR 2007, and the 5th Rich Transcription 2007 Meeting Recognition evaluation, RT 2007, held in succession in Baltimore, MD, USA, in May 2007.

The workshops had complementary evaluation efforts; CLEAR for the evaluation of human activities, events, and relationships in multiple multimodal data domains; and RT for the evaluation of speech transcription-related technologies from meeting room audio collections. The 35 revised full papers presented from CLEAR 2007 cover 3D person tracking, 2D face detection and tracking, person and vehicle tracking on surveillance data, vehicle and person tracking aerial videos, person identification, head pose estimation, and acoustic event detection. The 15 revised full papers presented from RT 2007 are organized in topical sections on speech-to-text, and speaker diarization.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, AMDO 2008, held in Port d'Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, in July 2008.

The 36 revised full papers and 7 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers are organized in topical section on computer graphics: human modelling and animation, human motion: analysis, tracking, 3D reconstruction and recognition, multimodal user interaction: VR and ar, speech, biometrics, and advanced multimedia systems: standards, indexed video contents.

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term "Information Society Age" seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2009, held in Kelowna, Canada, in May 2009.

The 15 revised full papers presented together with 19 revised short papers, 8 papers from the graduate student symposium and the abstracts of 3 keynote presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers present original high-quality research in all areas of Artificial Intelligence and apply historical AI techniques to modern problem domains as well as recent techniques to historical problem settings.

Overthelastdecades, energyminimizationmethods havebecomeanestablished paradigm to resolve a variety of challenges in the ?elds of computer vision and pattern recognition. While traditional approaches to computer vision were often based on a heuristic sequence of processing steps and merely allowed very l- ited theoretical understanding of the respective methods, most state-of-the-art methods are nowadays based on the concept of computing solutions to a given problem by minimizing respective energies. This volume contains the papers presented at the 7th International Conf- ence on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Rec- nition (EMMCVPR 2009), held at the University of Bonn, Germany, August 24-28, 2009. These papers demonstrate that energy minimization methods have become a mature ?eld of research spanning a broad range of areas from discrete graph theoretic approaches and Markov random ?elds to variational methods and partial di?erential equations. Application areas include image segmentation and tracking, shape optimization and registration, inpainting and image deno- ing, color and texture modeling, statistics and learning. Overall, we received 75 high-quality double-blind submissions. Based on the reviewer recommendations, 36paperswereselectedforpublication,18asoraland18asposterpresentations. Both oral and poster papers were attributed the same number of pages in the conference proceedings. Furthermore, we were delighted that three leading experts from the ?elds of computer vision and energy minimization, namely, Richard Hartley (C- berra, Australia), Joachim Weickert (Saarbruc ] ken, Germany) and Guillermo Sapiro(Minneapolis, USA)agreedtofurtherenrichtheconferencewithinspiring keynote lectures.

The First Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2009) was held at Nanjing, China during November 2-4, 2009.This was the ?rst edition of a series of annual conferences which aim to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related ?elds to share their new ideas and research ?ndings. This year we received 113 submissions from 18 countries and regions in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. The submissions went through a r- orous double-blind reviewing process. Most submissions received four reviews, a few submissions received ?ve reviews, while only several submissions received three reviews. Each submission was handled by an Area Chair who coordinated discussions among reviewers and made recommendation on the submission. The Program Committee Chairs examined the reviews and meta-reviews to further guarantee the reliability and integrity of the reviewing process. Twenty-nine - pers were selected after this process. To ensure that important revisions required by reviewers were incorporated into the ?nal accepted papers, and to allow submissions which would have - tential after a careful revision, this year we launched a "revision double-check" process. In short, the above-mentioned 29 papers were conditionally accepted, and the authors were requested to incorporate the "important-and-must"re- sionssummarizedbyareachairsbasedonreviewers'comments.Therevised?nal version and the revision list of each conditionally accepted paper was examined by the Area Chair and Program Committee Chairs. Papers that failed to pass the examination were ?nally rejected.

Welcome to the Second International Conference on Contemporary Computing, which was held in Noida (outskirts of New Delhi), India. Computing is an exciting and evolving area. This conference, which was jointly organized by the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University, Noida, India and the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA, focused on topics that are of contemporary interest to computer and computational scientists and engineers. The conference had an exciting technical program of 61 papers submitted by - searchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to advance the algorithmic, systems, applications, and educational aspects of contemporary comp- ing. These papers were selected from 213 submissions (with an overall acceptance rate of around 29%). The technical program was put together by a distinguished int- national Program Committee. The Program Committee was led by the following Track Chairs and Special Session Chairs: Srinivas Aluru, Rajkumar Buyya, Yeh-Ching Chung, Sumeet Dua, Ananth Grama, Sandeep Gupta, Rajeev Kumar and Vir Phoha. I would like to thank the Program Committee, the Track Chairs and Special Session Chairs for their tremendous effort. I would like to thank the General Chairs, Sartaj Sahni and Sanjay Goel for giving me the opportunity to lead the technical program. Sanjay Ranka

3D imaging sensors have been investigated for several decades. Recently, - provements on classical approaches such as stereo vision and structured light on the one hand, and novel time-of-?ight (ToF) techniques on the other hand have emerged, leading to 3D vision systems with radically improvedcharacter- tics. Presently, these techniques make full-range 3D data available at interactive frame rates, and thus open the path toward a much broader application of 3D vision systems. The workshop on Dynamic 3D Vision (Dyn3D) was held in conjunction with the annual conference of the German Association of Pattern Recognition (DAGM) in Jena on September 9, 2009. Previous workshops in this series have focused on the same topic, i.e., the Dynamic 3D Vision workshopin conjunction with the DAGM conference in 2007 and the CVPR workshop Time of Flight Camera-Based Computer Vision (TOF-CV) in 2008. The goal of this year's workshop, as for the prior events, was to constitute a platform for researchers working in the ?eld of real-time range imaging, where all aspects, from sensor evaluation to application scenarios, are addressed. After a very competitive and high-quality reviewing process, 13 papers were accepted for publication in this LNCS issue. The research area on dynamic 3D vision proved to be extremely lively. Again, as for prior workshops on this ?eld, numerous new insights and novel approaches on time-of-?ight sensors, on re- time mono- and multidimensional data processing and on various applications are presented in these workshop proceedings.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2009, held in Jena, Germany, in September 2009.

The 56 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on motion and tracking; pedestrian recognition and automotive applications; features; single-view and 3D reconstruction; learning and classification; pattern recognition and estimation; stereo and multi-view reconstruction; image analysis and applications; and segmentation.

Kernel methods provide a powerful and unified framework for pattern discovery, motivating algorithms that can act on general types of data (e.g. strings, vectors or text) and look for general types of relations (e.g. rankings, classifications, regressions, clusters). The application areas range from neural networks and pattern recognition to machine learning and data mining. This book, developed from lectures and tutorials, fulfils two major roles: firstly it provides practitioners with a large toolkit of algorithms, kernels and solutions ready to use for standard pattern discovery problems in fields such as bioinformatics, text analysis, image analysis. Secondly it provides an easy introduction for students and researchers to the growing field of kernel-based pattern analysis, demonstrating with examples how to handcraft an algorithm or a kernel for a new specific application, and covering all the necessary conceptual and mathematical tools to do so.

The 21st International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA-AIE 2008) held in Wroclaw, Poland was an international scientific forum for researchers in the field of applied artificial intelligence. The presentations of the invited speakers and the authors focused on developing and employing methods and systems to solve real-life problems in all applied intelligence areas. The IEA-AIE conference series, chaired by Moonis Ali, has a very long tradition, and it is the first time it was hosted in Poland. We received 302 papers from 52 countries. Each paper was sent to at least three Program Committee members for review. Although the general quality of the submissions was very high, only 90 best papers were selected for oral presentation and publication in the LNAI proceedings. The papers in the proceedings cover the following topics: computer vision, fuzzy system applications, robot, manufacturing, data mining and knowledge discovery, neural network, machine learning, natural language processing, Internet application, e-learning, heuristic search, application systems, agent-based system, evolutionary and genetic algorithms, knowledge management, and other applications. These papers highlight new trends and frontiers of applied artificial intelligence and show how new research could lead to new and innovative applications. We hope you will find these works useful and inspiring for your own research. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Program Committee members and all the reviewers for their hard work, which helped us to select the highest quality papers for the conference.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

The two-volume set LNCS 5601 and LNCS 5602 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2009, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in June 2009.

The 108 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes. The first volume includes papers relating the most recent collaborations with Professor Mira and contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

The two-volume set LNCS 5601 and LNCS 5602 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2009, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in June 2009.

The 108 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes. The first volume includes papers relating the most recent collaborations with Professor Mira and contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.