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.

TheThirdIAPRTC3WorkshoponArti?cialNeuralNetworksinPatternRec- nition, ANNPR 2008, was held at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (France), July 2-4, 2008. The workshop was organized by the Technical C- mittee on Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (TC3) that is one of the 20 TCs of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The scope of TC3 includes computational intelligence approaches, such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing and arti?cial neural networks and their use in various pattern recognition applications. ANNPR 2008 followed the success of the previous workshops: ANNPR 2003 held at the University of Florence (Italy) andANPPR 2006held at ReisensburgCastle, Universityof Ulm (Germany).All the workshops featured a single-track program including both oral sessions and posters with a focus on active participation from every participant. Inrecentyears, the?eld ofneuralnetworkshasmaturedconsiderablyinboth methodologyandreal-worldapplications.Asre?ectedinthisbook, arti?cialn- ral networks in pattern recognition combine many ideas from machine learning, advanced statistics, signal and image processing for solving complex real-world pattern recognition problems. High quality across such a diverse ?eld of research can only be achieved through a rigorous and selective review process. For this workshop, 57 papers were submitted out of which 29 were selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The oral sessions included 18 papers, while 11 contributions were presented as posters. ANNPR 2008 featured research works in the areas of supervised and unsupervised learning, multiple classi?er systems, pattern recognition in signal and image processing, and feature selectio

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 volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on "Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions" held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.

This volume is part of the two-volume proceedings of the 19th International Conf- ence on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2009), which was held in Cyprus during September 14-17, 2009. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting sp- sored by the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), in cooperation with the - ternational Neural Network Society (INNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). ICANN 2009 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intel- gence Society. This series of conferences has been held annually since 1991 in various European countries and covers the field of neurocomputing, learning systems and related areas. Artificial neural networks provide an information-processing structure inspired by biological nervous systems. They consist of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements, with the capability of learning by example. The field of artificial neural networks has evolved significantly in the last two decades, with active partici- tion from diverse fields, such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, system theory, biology, operations research, and neuroscience. Artificial neural networks have been widely applied for pattern recognition, control, optimization, image processing, classification, signal processing, etc.

This book constitutes the refeered proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, IPMI 2009, held in Williamsburg, VA, USA, in July 2009

The 26 revised full papers and 33 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on diffusion imaging, PET imaging, image registration, functional networks, space curves, tractography, microscopy, exploratory analyses, features and detection, image guided surgery, shape analysis, motion, and segmentation and validation.

The Annual (ICGS) International Conference is an established platform in which se- rity, safety and sustainability issues can be examined from several global perspectives through dialogue between academics, students, government representatives, chief executives, security professionals, and research scientists from the United Kingdom and from around the globe. The 2009 two-day conference focused on the challenges of complexity, rapid pace of change and risk/opportunity issues associated with modern products, systems, s- cial events and infrastructures. The importance of adopting systematic and systemic approaches to the assurance of these systems was emphasized within a special stream focused on strategic frameworks, architectures and human factors. The conference provided an opportunity for systems scientists, assurance researchers, owners, ope- tors and maintainers of large, complex and advanced systems and infrastructures to update their knowledge with the state of best practice in these challenging domains while networking with the leading researchers and solution providers. ICGS3 2009 received paper submissions from more than 20 different countries around the world. Only 28 papers were selected and were presented as full papers. The program also included three keynote lectures by leading researchers, security professionals and government representatives. June 2009 Hamid Jahankhani Ali Hessami Feng Hsu

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.

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.

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 contains 71 original, scienti?c articles that address state-of-the-art researchrelatedto scale space and variationalmethods for image processing and computer vision. Topics covered in the book range from mathematical analysis of both established and new models, fast numerical methods, image analysis, segmentation, registration, surface and shape construction and processing, to real applications in medical imaging and computer vision. The ideas of scale spaceandvariationalmethodsrelatedtopartialdi?erentialequationsarecentral concepts. The papers re?ect the newest developments in these ?elds and also point to the latest literature. All the papers were submitted to the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision, which took place in Voss, Norway, during June 1-5, 2009. The papers underwent a peer review process similar to that of high-level journals in the ?eld. We thank the authors, the Scienti?c Committee, the Program Committee and the reviewers for their hard work and helpful collaboration. Their contribution has been crucial for the e?cient processing of this book, and for the success of the conference.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2009, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal in June 2009.

The 33 revised full papers and 29 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer vision, image analysis and processing, as well as pattern recognition.

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.

This book contains the best papers of the Second International Conference on So- ware and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2007), held in Barcelona, Spain. It was org- ized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control (INSTICC), co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST). The purpose of ICSOFT 2007 was to bring together researchers and practitioners int- ested in information technology and software development. The conference tracks were "Software Engineering," "Information Systems and Data Management," "Programming Languages," "Distributed and Parallel Systems" and "Knowledge Engineering." Being crucial for the development of information systems, software and data te- nologies encompass a large number of research topics and applications: from imp- mentation-related issues to more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data warehouses to management information systems and kno- edge-base systems; next to that, distributed systems, pervasive computing, data quality and other related topics are included in the scope of this conference.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der Workshop Bildverarbeitung fur die Medizin durch erfolgreiche Veranstaltungen etabliert. Ziel ist auch 2009 wieder die Darstellung aktueller Forschungsergebnisse und die Vertiefung der Gesprache zwischen Wissenschaftlern, Industrie und Anwendern. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes - einige in englischer Sprache - behandeln alle Bereiche der medizinischen Bildverarbeitung, insbesondere Bildgebung, CAD, Segmentierung, Bildanalyse, Visualisierung und Animation, Roboter und Manipulatoren, Chirurgische Simulatoren, Diagnose, Therapieplanung sowie deren klinische Anwendungen."

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 and euCognition International Training School on "Multimodal Signals: C- nitive and Algorithmic Issues" held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, April 22 -26, 2008. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org) in the domain of Information and Communi- tion Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" (www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/Verbal_and_Non- verbal _Communication) and by euCognition: The European Network for Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems (www.euCognition.org). COST Action 2102, in its second year of life, brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D int- active virtual world, able to interact intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users. The main theme of the school was to investigate the mathematical and psycholo- cal tools for modelling human-machine interaction through access to a graded series of tasks for measuring the amount of adjustment (as well as intelligence and achie- ment) needed for introducing new concepts in the information communication te- nology domain in order to develop adaptive, socially enabled and human-centered automatic systems able to serve remote applications in medicine, learning, care, re- bilitation, and for accessibility to work, employment, and information.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2009, held in Tubingen, Germany, in April 2009 colocated with the Evo* 2009 events.

The 17 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. EvoBio is the premiere European event for experts in computer science meeting with experts in bioinformatics and the biological sciences, all interested in the interface between evolutionary computation, machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics, and computational biology. Topics addressed by the papers include biomarker discovery, cell simulation and modeling, ecological modeling, uxomics, gene networks, biotechnology, metabolomics, microarray analysis, phylogenetics, protein interactions, proteomics, sequence analysis and alignment, as well as systems biology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2008, held in Juan-les-Pins, France, in October 2008.

The 33 revised full papers and 69 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and video coding; systems and applications; video processing; filtering and restoration; segmentation and feature extraction; tracking, scene understanding and computer vision; medical imaging; and biometrics and surveillance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2007, held in Valparaiso, Chile, November 13-16, 2007.

The 97 revised full papers presented together with 4 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research and mathematical methods for pattern recognition, image analysis, and applications in such diverse areas as computer vision, robotics and remote sensing, industry, health, space exploration, data mining, document analysis, natural language processing and speech recognition.

This book includes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2007, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, comprising two component conferences, namely, the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and App- cations (GRAPP), held in Barcelona, Spain, during March 8-11, 2007. We received quite a high number of paper submissions: 382 in total for both conf- ences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all five continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, a total of 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 18 got selected for inclusion in this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from papers 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 2007 included four invited keynote lectures, presented by internati- ally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an important contribution to increasing the overall quality of the conference. We would like to express our - preciation to all invited keynote speakers, in alphabetical order: Jake K. Aggarwal (The University of Texas at Austin/USA), Andre Gagalowicz (INRIA/France), Wo- gang Heidrich (University of British Columbia/Canada), Mel Slater (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Spain)."

The 8th edition of the International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geograp- cal Information Systems (W2GIS 2008) was held in December 2008, in the vibrant city of Shanghai, China. This annual symposium aims at providing a forum for discussing advances on recent developments and research results in the ?eld of Web and wireless geographical information systems. Promoted from workshop to s- posium in 2005, W2GIS now represents a prestigious event within this dynamic research community. These proceedings contain the papers selected for presen- tion at this international event. For the 2008 edition, we received 38 submissions from 16 countries. All subm- ted papers were related to topics of interest to the symposium. Each paper received three reviews. Based on these reviews, 14 papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The accepted papers are all of excellent quality and cover topics that range from mobile networks and location-based services, to contextual representation and mapping, to geospatial Web techniques, to object tracking in Web and mobile environments. We wish to thank all authors that contributed to this symposium for the high quality of their papers and presentations. Our sincere thanks go to Springer's LNCS team. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Program C- mittee members for the quality and timeliness of their reviews. Finally, many thanks to the Steering Committee members for providing continuous support and advice.

This volume in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series contains 98 papers presented at the S+SSPR 2008 workshops. S+SSPR 2008 was the sixth time that the SPR and SSPR workshops organized by Technical Committees, TC1 and TC2, of the International Association for Pattern Rec- nition (IAPR) wereheld as joint workshops. S+SSPR 2008was held in Orlando, Florida, the family entertainment capital of the world, on the beautiful campus of the University of Central Florida, one of the up and coming metropolitan universities in the USA. S+SSPR 2008 was held during December 4-6, 2008 only a few days before the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recog- tion(ICPR2008), whichwasheldin Tampa, onlytwo hoursawayfromOrlando, thus giving the opportunity of both conferences to attendees to enjoy the many attractions o?ered by two neighboring cities in the state of Florida. SPR 2008 and SSPR 2008 received a total of 175 paper submissions from many di?erent countries around the world, thus giving the workshop an int- national clout, as was the case for past workshops. This volume contains 98 accepted papers: 56 for oral presentations and 42 for poster presentations. In addition to parallel oral sessions for SPR and SSPR, there was also one joint oral session with papers of interest to both the SPR and SSPR communities. A recent trend that has emerged in the pattern recognition and machine lea- ing research communities is the study of graph-based methods that integrate statistical andstructural approache

The 4th International Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality, MIAR 2008, was held at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan during August 1-2, 2008. The goal of MIAR 2008 was to bring together researchersin medical imaging and intervention to present state-of-the-art developments in this ever-growing research area. Rapid technical advances in medical imaging, including its gr- ing application in drug/gene therapy and invasive/interventional procedures, have attracted signi?cant interest in the close integration of research in the life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, and engineering. Current research is also motivated by the fact that medical imaging is moving increasingly from a p- marily diagnostic modality towards a therapeutic and interventional aid, driven by the streamlining of diagnostic and therapeutic processes for human diseases by means of imaging modalities and robotic-assisted surgery. The impact of MIAR on these ?elds increases each year, and the quality of submitted papers this yearwas veryimpressive. We received90 full submissions, which were subsequently reviewed by up to ?ve reviewers. Reviewer a?liations were carefully checked against author a?liations to avoid con?icts of interest, and the review process was run as a double-blind process. A special procedure was also devised for papers from the universities of the organizers, upholding a double-blind review process for these papers. The MIAR 2008 Program C- mittee ?nally accepted 44 full papers. For this workshop, we also included three papers from the invited speakers coveringregistration and segmentation, virtual reality, and perceptual docking for robotic control.

The chapters in this volume were presented at the July-August 2008 NATO Advanced Study Institute on Unexploded Ordnance Detection and Mitigation. The conference was held at the beautiful Il Ciocco resort near Lucca, in the glorious Tuscany region of northern Italy. For the ninth time we gathered at this idyllic spot to explore and extend the reciprocity between mathematics and engineering. The dynamic interaction between world-renowned scientists from the usually disparate communities of pure mathematicians and applied scientists which occurred at our eight previous ASI's continued at this meeting. The detection and neutralization of unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been of major concern for very many decades; at least since the First World war. UXO continues to be the subject of intensive research in many ?elds of science, incl- ing mathematics, signal processing (mainly radar and sonar) and chemistry. While today's headlines emphasize the mayhem resulting from the placement of imp- vised explosive devices (IEDs), humanitarian landmine clearing continues to draw signi?cant global attention as well. In many countries of the world, landmines threaten the population and hinder reconstruction and fast, ef?cient utilization of large areas of the mined land in the aftermath of military con?icts.

This volume (5116) of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains the th proceedings of the 9 International Workshop on Digital Mammography (IWDM) which was held July 20 - 23, 2008 in Tucson, AZ in the USA. The IWDM meetings traditionally bring together a diverse set of researchers (physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers), clinicians (radiologists, surgeons) and representatives of industry, who are jointly committed to developing technologies to support clinicians in the early detection and subsequent patient management of breast cancer. The IWDM conference series was initiated at a 1993 meeting of the SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium in San Jose, CA, with subsequent meetings hosted every two years at sites around the world. Previous meetings were held in York, England; Chicago, IL USA; Nijmegen, Netherlands; Toronto, Canada; Bremen, Germany; Durham, NC USA and Manchester, UK. th The 9 IWDM meeting was attended by a very international group of participants, and during the two and one-half days of scientific sessions there were 70 oral presentations, 34 posters and 3 keynote addresses. The three keynote speakers discussed some of the "hot" topics in breast imaging today. Karen Lindfors spoke on "Dedicated Breast CT: Initial Clinical Experiences. " Elizabeth Rafferty asked the question is "Breast Tomosynthesis: Ready for Prime Time?" Finally, Martin Tornai discussed "3D Multi-Modality Molecular Breast Imaging.