Image analysis is a computational feat which humans show excellence in, in comp- ison with computers. Yet the list of applications that rely on automatic processing of images has been growing at a fast pace. Biometric authentication by face, ?ngerprint, and iris, online character recognition in cell phones as well as drug design tools are but a few of its benefactors appearing on the headlines. This is, of course, facilitated by the valuable output of the resarch community in the past 30 years. The pattern recognition and computer vision communities that study image analysis have large conferences, which regularly draw 1000 parti- pants. In a way this is not surprising, because much of the human-speci?c activities critically rely on intelligent use of vision. If routine parts of these activities can be automated, much is to be gained in comfort and sustainable development. The - search ?eld could equally be called visualintelligence because it concerns nearly all activities of awake humans. Humans use or rely on pictures or pictorial languages to represent, analyze, and develop abstract metaphors related to nearly every aspect of thinking and behaving, be it science, mathematics, philosopy, religion, music, or emotions. The present volume is an introductory textbook on signal analysis of visual c- putation for senior-level undergraduates or for graduate students in science and - gineering. My modest goal has been to present the frequently used techniques to analyze images in a common framework-directional image processing.

Image analysis is a computational feat which humans show excellence in, in comp- ison with computers. Yet the list of applications that rely on automatic processing of images has been growing at a fast pace. Biometric authentication by face, ?ngerprint, and iris, online character recognition in cell phones as well as drug design tools are but a few of its benefactors appearing on the headlines. This is, of course, facilitated by the valuable output of the resarch community in the past 30 years. The pattern recognition and computer vision communities that study image analysis have large conferences, which regularly draw 1000 parti- pants. In a way this is not surprising, because much of the human-speci?c activities critically rely on intelligent use of vision. If routine parts of these activities can be automated, much is to be gained in comfort and sustainable development. The - search ?eld could equally be called visualintelligence because it concerns nearly all activities of awake humans. Humans use or rely on pictures or pictorial languages to represent, analyze, and develop abstract metaphors related to nearly every aspect of thinking and behaving, be it science, mathematics, philosopy, religion, music, or emotions. The present volume is an introductory textbook on signal analysis of visual c- putation for senior-level undergraduates or for graduate students in science and - gineering. My modest goal has been to present the frequently used techniques to analyze images in a common framework-directional image processing.

Automatic person authentication, the identification and verification of an individual as such, has increasingly been acknowledged as a significant aspect of various security applications. Various recognition and identification systems have been based on biometrics utilizing biometric features such as fingerprint, face, retina scans, iris patterns, hand geometry, DNA traces, gait, and others.

This book originates from an international summer school on biometrics, held in Alghero, Italy, in June 2003. The seven revised tutorial lectures by leading researchers introduce the reader to biometrics-based person authentication, fingerprint recognition, gait recognition, various aspects of face recognition and face detection, topologies for biometric recognition, and hand detection. Also included are the four best selected student papers, all dealing with face recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Biometric Authentication held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June 2001 as a satellite event of ECCV 2002.The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed. The papers are organized in topical sections on face recognition, fingerprint recognition, psychology and biometrics, face detection and localization, gait and signature recognition, and classifiers for recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Audio- and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA 2001, held in Halmstad, Sweden in June 2001.The 51 revised papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on face as biometrics; face image processing; speech as biometrics and speech processing; fingerprints as biometrics; gait as biometrics; and hand, signature, and iris as biometrics.

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.