Automatic and reliable authentication of individuals is becoming an essential part of the modern world, for security and convenience in our life, in our work andin society.Biometrics-basedsystems utilize physiologicalorbehavioralch- acteristics of an individual including the face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, hand, voice, signature, or a combination of them, for this task. We are now seeing increasing interest and practical deployment of biometric systems. TheInternationalWorkshoponBiometricRecognitionSystems(IWBRS2005) was held in conjunction with ICCV 2005, providing an interactive forum for leading biometrics researchersand system designers.A biometric authentication competition (BAC) was conducted by the workshopto track the state-of-the-art biometrics technologies. This volume of workshop proceedings includes 32 papers carefully selected from a total of 130 submissions. The papers address the problems in face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, speech, writing and other biometrics, and contribute new ideastoresearchanddevelopmentofreliableandpracticalsolutionsforbiometric authentication. We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, and ProgramCommittee and OrganizingCommittee members who made this a very successful workshop. We also wish to acknowledge the Institute of Automation, ChineseAcademyofSciences,andSpringerforsponsoringthisworkshop.Special thanks are due to Miao Hong, Xin Yang, Zhuoshi Wei, Yinghao Cai, Zhaofeng He, Cheng Zhong, Shiqi Yu and Xianchao Qiu for their hard work in workshop organization. We hope you could bene?t from the fruitful workshop to improve the perf- mance of your biometric systems.

This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the 9th International Summer School "Neural Nets E.R. Caianiello" on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Al- rithms and Analysis, held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, during September 13-18, 2004. The aim of this book is to provide primarily high-level tutorial coverage of the ?elds related to nonlinear methods for speech processing and analysis, including new approaches aimed at improving speech applications. Fourteen surveys are offered by specialists in the ?eld. Consequently, the volume may be used as a reference book on nonlinear methods for speech processing and an- ysis. Also included are ?fteen papers that present original contributions in the ?eld and complete the tutorials. The volume is divided into ?ve sections: Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech S- nal, Acoustic-to-Articulatory Modeling of Speech Phenomena, Data Driven and Speech Processing Algorithms, Algorithms and Models Based on Speech Perception Mec- nisms, and Task-Oriented Speech Applications. Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech Signals is an introductory section where n- linear aspects of the speech signal are introduced from three different points of view. The section includes three papers. The ?rst paper, authored by Anna Esposito and Maria Marinaro, is an attempt to introduce the concept of nonlinearity revising several nonl- ear phenomena observed in the acoustics, the production and the perception of speech. Also discussed is the engineering endeavor to model these phenomena.

Speech Processing, Recognition and Artificial Neural Networks contains papers from leading researchers and selected students, discussing the experiments, theories and perspectives of acoustic phonetics as well as the latest techniques in the field of spe ech science and technology. Topics covered in this book include; Fundamentals of Speech Analysis and Perceptron; Speech Processing; Stochastic Models for Speech; Auditory and Neural Network Models for Speech; Task-Oriented Applications of Automatic Speech Recognition and Synthesis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Audio- and Video-based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA'97, held in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in March 1997.
The 49 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected by the program committee for inclusion in the book; also included are four invited contributions. The papers are organized in sections on facial features localisation, lip and facial motion, visual non-face biometrics, face-based authentication, text-dependent speaker authentication, text-independent authentication, audio-video features and fusion, and systems and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2007, held in Paris, France, September 17-19, 2007.

The 19 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented together with 5 invited talks and the abstracts of 32 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Rendering and Analysis, Culture and Identity, Behavior Models, Feedback Models, Dialogues, Applications, Evaluation, Gaze models and Emotions.