As is true with most areas of Artificial Intelligence, there is real need for a symbiotic relationship between the biological and artificial - a need for problems to be viewed from many different angles, and particularly so in the study of vision. The INSIGHT consortium is taking steps in this direction. In a traditional sense, the papers in this volume are represented by the areas of neuroscience, psychophysics and traditional computer vision. However, to gain deeper insight into vision processes, it is the interaction of scientific ideas from these areas that is essential. The scope of the topics discussed has a definite interdisciplinary flavour: at one end of the spectrum we have experiments performed and direct measurement of the responses of neurons to visual stimuli; at the other end we have the mathematical and computational aspects of optical flow (the relative motion between observer and object) and approaches of tackling vision through binocular disparities (stereopsis). Traditional edge detection (essential for the initial classification of shape) is also covered as is the study of natural texture patterns that occur on object surfaces. A fundamental aim of the Basic Research part of the ESPRIT programme is the pro duction and maintenance of a pool of research expertise in Europe, from which both fur ther research and industry can draw. As the authors state in their preface, this project has not only succesfully merged the talents of senior researchers from different backgrounds, but also brought many young ones along."

During the last decade of the twentieth century, computer vision made considerable progress towards the consolidation of its fundaments, in particular regarding the treatment of geometry for the evaluation of stereo image pairs and of multi-view image recordings. Scientists thus began to look at basic computer vision solutions - irrespective of the well-perceived need to perfection these further - as components which should be explored in a larger context.

This volume is a post-event proceedings volume and contains selected papers based on the presentations given, and the lively discussions that ensued, during a seminar held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in October 2003. Co-sponsored by ECVision, the cognitive vision network of excellence, it was organized to further strengthen cooperation between research groups from different countries, and scientists active in related areas were invited from around the world.

The 18 thoroughly revised papers presented are organized in topical sections on foundations of cognitive vision systems, recognition and categorization, learning and adaptation, representation and inference, control and systems integration, and conclusions.

The AMDO 2000 workshop took place at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) on 7-9 September 2000, sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee, the European Commission by - man Potential Program:High Level Scienti?c Conferences and the Mathematics andComputer Science DepartmentofUIB. Thesubject ofthe workshopwas- goingresearchinarticulatedmotiononthesequenceofimagesandsophisticated models for deformable objects. The goals of these areas are to understand and interpret object motion around complex objects that we can ?nd in sequences of images in the real world. These topics (geometry and physics of deformable models, motion analysis, articulated models and animation, visualization of - formable models, 3D recovery from motion, single or multiple human motion analysis and synthesis, applications of deformable models and motion analysis, etc. ) are interesting examples of how research can be used to solve more general problems. Another objective of this workshop was to relate ?elds using c- puter graphics, computer animation or applications in several disciplines c- bining synthetic and analytical images. In this regard it is of particular interest to encouragelinksbetweenresearchersinareasofcomputervisionandcomputer graphics who have common problems and frequently use similar techniques. The workshop included four sessions of presented papers and two tutorials. Invited speakers treating various aspects of the topics were: Y. Aloimonos from the Computer Vision Laboratory, Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, USA, G. Medioni from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent S- tems,UniversityofSouthernCalifornia,USA,andR. Boulic,Adjointscienti?que from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. September 2000 H. -H. Nagel and F. J.

Since several years, methods and entire systems have been developped to evaluate digitized picture data from rather different problem areas such as medicine, geological and earth resource investigations, sa- tellite applications, and industrial automation to name but a few. As is to be expected, methodical approaches are usually first published in the context of the special application for which they have been de- velopped. To intensify the exchange of know-how regarding the various methods across the boundaries of special application areas, the Technical Com- mittee 6 of the Gesellschaft fur Informatik in cooperation with the Technical Committee 6 of the Nachrichtentechnische Gesellschaft in the VDE have organized a conference on Digitized Image Processing at Munich, March 28-30, 1977, the proceedings of which are presented in this v- ume. It is a pleasure to thank my colleagues J. Bodechtel, MUnchen R. Dierstein, Oberpfaffenhofen Th. Einsele, MUnchen P. Heintzen, Kiel H. Kazmierczak, Karlsruhe A. Schief, Karlsruhe J. SchUrmann, Ulm for their willingness to offer their time and cooperation under some- what stringent boundary conditions in selecting the program for this conference. My special thanks are due to Prof. Bodechtel for his or- ganizational effort to host the conference at his institute. May I mention that Munich with its world renown treasures of paintings provides the opportunity to experience some individual picture process- ing of a kind which in my opinion is worth the effort even it is not digital.