Images have always been very important in human life. Their applications range from primitive communication between humans of all ages to advanced technologies in the industrial, medical and military field. The increased possibilities to capture and analyze images have contributed to the largeness that the scientific field of "image processing" has become today. Many techniques are being applied, including soft computing.

"Soft Computing in Image Processing: Recent Advances" follows the edited volumes "Fuzzy Techniques in Image Processing" (volume 52, published in 2000) and "Fuzzy Filters for Image Processing" (volume 122, published in 2003), and covers a wide range of both practical and theoretical applications of soft computing in image processing. The 16 excellent chapters of the book have been grouped into five parts: Applications in Remote Sensing, Applications in Image Retrieval, Applications in Image Analysis, Other Applications, and Theoretical Contributions. The focus of the book is on practical applications, which makes it interesting for every researcher that is involved with soft computing, image processing, or both scientific branches.

The ongoing increase in scale of integration of electronics makes storage and computational power affordable to many applications. Also image process ing systems can benefit from this trend. A variety of algorithms for image processing tasks becomes close at hand. From the whole range of possible approaches, those based on fuzzy logic are the ones this book focusses on. A particular useful property of fuzzy logic techniques is their ability to represent knowledge in a way which is comprehensible to human interpretation. The theory of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic was initiated in 1965 by Zadeh, and is one of the most developed models to treat imprecision and uncertainty. Instead of the classical approach that an object belongs or does not belong to a set, the concept of a fuzzy set allows a gradual transition from mem bership to nonmembership, providing partial degrees of membership. Fuzzy techniques are often complementary to existing techniques and can contribute to the development of better and more robust methods, as has already been illustrated in numerous scientific branches. The present book resulted from the workshop "Fuzzy Filters for Image Processing" which was organized at the 10th FUZZ-IEEE Conference in Mel bourne, Australia. At this event several speakers have given an overview of the current state-of-the-art of fuzzy filters for image processing. Afterwards, the book has been completed with contributions of other international re searchers."