Traditional Pattern Recognition (PR) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies have mainly focused on full automation, even though full automation often proves elusive or unnatural in many applications, where the technology is expected to assist rather than replace the human agents. However, not all the problems can be automatically solved being the human interaction the only way to tackle those applications. Recently, multimodal human interaction has become an important field of increasing interest in the research community. Advanced man-machine interfaces with high cognitive capabilities are a hot research topic that aims at solving challenging problems in image and video applications. Actually, the idea of computer interactive systems was already proposed on the early stages of computer science. Nowadays, the ubiquity of image sensors together with the ever-increasing computing performance has open new and challenging opportunities for research in multimodal human interaction. This book aims to show how existing PR and CV technologies can naturally evolve using this new paradigm. The chapters of this book show different successful case studies of multimodal interactive technologies for both image and video applications. They cover a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from interactive handwriting transcriptions to human-robot interactions in real environments.

Traditional Pattern Recognition (PR) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies have mainly focused on full automation, even though full automation often proves elusive or unnatural in many applications, where the technology is expected to assist rather than replace the human agents. However, not all the problems can be automatically solved being the human interaction the only way to tackle those applications. Recently, multimodal human interaction has become an important field of increasing interest in the research community. Advanced man-machine interfaces with high cognitive capabilities are a hot research topic that aims at solving challenging problems in image and video applications. Actually, the idea of computer interactive systems was already proposed on the early stages of computer science. Nowadays, the ubiquity of image sensors together with the ever-increasing computing performance has open new and challenging opportunities for research in multimodal human interaction. This book aims to show how existing PR and CV technologies can naturally evolve using this new paradigm. The chapters of this book show different successful case studies of multimodal interactive technologies for both image and video applications. They cover a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from interactive handwriting transcriptions to human-robot interactions in real environments.

Human visual perception is limited to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not. Cameras sensitive to the different infrared spectra can enhance the abilities of autonomous systems and visually perceive the environment in a holistic way. Relevant scene content can be made visible especially in situations, where sensors of other modalities face issues like a visual-optical camera that needs a source of illumination. As a consequence, not only human mistakes can be avoided by increasing the level of automation, but also machine-induced errors can be reduced that, for example, could make a self-driving car crash into a pedestrian under difficult illumination conditions. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can provably increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Applications that can benefit from utilizing infrared imagery range from robotics to automotive and from biometrics to surveillance. In this book, we provide a brief yet concise introduction to the current state-of-the-art of computer vision and machine learning in the infrared spectrum. Based on various popular computer vision tasks such as image enhancement, object detection, or object tracking, we first motivate each task starting from established literature in the visual-optical spectrum. Then, we discuss the differences between processing images and videos in the visual-optical spectrum and the various infrared spectra. An overview of the current literature is provided together with an outlook for each task. Furthermore, available and annotated public datasets and common evaluation methods and metrics are presented. In a separate chapter, popular applications that can greatly benefit from the use of infrared imagery as a data source are presented and discussed. Among them are automatic target recognition, video surveillance, or biometrics including face recognition. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for well-fitting sensor setups and data processing algorithms for certain computer vision tasks. We address this book to prospective researchers and engineers new to the field but also to anyone who wants to get introduced to the challenges and the approaches of computer vision using infrared images or videos. Readers will be able to start their work directly after reading the book supported by a highly comprehensive backlog of recent and relevant literature as well as related infrared datasets including existing evaluation frameworks. Together with consistently decreasing costs for infrared cameras, new fields of application appear and make computer vision in the infrared spectrum a great opportunity to face nowadays scientific and engineering challenges.

This book is the result of four-year work in the framework of the Ibero-American Research Network TICs4CI funded by the CYTED program. In the following decades, 85% of the world's population is expected to live in cities; hence, urban centers should be prepared to provide smart solutions for problems ranging from video surveillance and intelligent mobility to the solid waste recycling processes, just to mention a few. More specifically, the book describes underlying technologies and practical implementations of several successful case studies of ICTs developed in the following smart city areas: * Urban environment monitoring * Intelligent mobility * Waste recycling processes * Video surveillance * Computer-aided diagnose in healthcare systems * Computer vision-based approaches for efficiency in production processes The book is intended for researchers and engineers in the field of ICTs for smart cities, as well as to anyone who wants to know about state-of-the-art approaches and challenges on this field.