This book seeks to elucidate picture engineering as a new discipline for hand- ling the entire scope of picture processing in a systematic manner. Picture engineering as a discipline has three aspects, the first of which is methodo- logical, technical, and architectural. The second consists of pattern ana- lysis and recognition of pictorial input, picture database management, inclu- ding picture data structure and data representation for picture storage and transformation, and computer graphics for picture output and display. Ver- satile applications such as computer-aided design, manufacturing and testing (CAD/CAM/CAT), office automation (GA), robotics, and fancy computer arts com- prise the third aspect. This book covers all three aspects in original papers by leading experts in the discipline. The book is divided into six parts. Part I covers the central topic of pictorial database management in three papers. The first, by Yamaguchi and Kunii, presents a data model for designing a picture database computer. The second, by Klinger, discusses the organization of computers for handling pic- torial data. In the third paper, Shi-Kuo Chang treats the indexing and enco- ding of pictorial data. Part II is devoted to picture representation. First, a general approach to picture analysis using both syntactic (structural) and semantic information is described by Fu. This is followed by an in-depth explanation of various 3-D shape representation methods by Ikebe and Miyamoto. Schumaker elaborates polar spline representation of 3-D objects, and finally,Enomoto, Yonezaki and Watanabe describe a unique method of characterizing 3-D surfaces by struc- ture lines.

During the past two decades there has been a considerable growth in interest in problems of pattern recognition and image processing (PRIP). This inter est has created an increasing need for methods and techniques for the design of PRIP systems. PRIP involves analysis, classification and interpretation of data. Practical applications of PRIP include character recognition, re mote sensing, analysis of medical signals and images, fingerprint and face identification, target recognition and speech understanding. One difficulty in making PRIP systems practically feasible, and hence, more popularly used, is the requirement of computer time and storage. This situation is particularly serious when the patterns to be analyzed are quite complex. Thus it is of the utmost importance to investigate special comput er architectures and their implementations for PRIP. Since the advent of VLSI technology, it is possible to put thousands of components on one chip. This reduces the cost of processors and increases the processing speed. VLSI algorithms and their implementations have been recently developed for PRIP. This book is intended to document the recent major progress in VLSI system design for PRIP applications."

This book contains the Proceedings of the S cond U. S. -Japan Seminar on Learning Control and Intelligent Control. The seminar, held at Gainesville, Florida, from October 22 to 26, 1973, was sponsored by the U. S. -Japan Cooperative Science Program, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The full texts of the twenty-one presented papers are included. The papers cover a variety of topics related to learning control and intelligent control, ranging from pattern recognition to system identification, from learning control to intelligent robots. During the past decade, there has been a considerable increase of interest in problems of machine learning, systems which exhibit learning behavior. In designing a system, if the a priori infor mation required is unknown or incompletely known, one approach is to design a system which is capable of learning the unknown infor mation during its operation. The learned information will then be used to improve the system's performance. This approach has been used in the design of pattern recognition systems, automatic control systems and system identification algorithms. If we naturally extend our goal to the design of systems which will behave more and more intelligently, learning systems research is only a preliminary step towards a general concept of integrated intelligent systems. One example of this class of systems is the intelligent robot, which integrates pattern recognition. learning and problem-solving into one intelligent system."

The many different mathematical techniques used to solve pattem recognition problems may be grouped into two general approaches: the decision-theoretic (or discriminant) approach and the syntactic (or structural) approach. In the decision-theoretic approach, aset of characteristic measurements, called features, are extracted from the pattems. Each pattem is represented by a feature vector, and the recognition of each pattem is usually made by partitioning the feature space. Applications of decision-theoretic approach indude character recognition, medical diagnosis, remote sensing, reliability and socio-economics. A relatively new approach is the syntactic approach. In the syntactic approach, ea ch pattem is expressed in terms of a composition of its components. The recognition of a pattem is usually made by analyzing the pattem structure according to a given set of rules. Earlier applications of the syntactic approach indude chromosome dassification, English character recognition and identification of bubble and spark chamber events. The purpose of this monograph is to provide a summary of the major reeent applications of syntactic pattem recognition. After a brief introduction of syntactic pattem recognition in Chapter 1, the nin e mai n chapters (Chapters 2-10) can be divided into three parts. The first three chapters concem with the analysis of waveforms using syntactic methods. Specific application examples indude peak detection and interpretation of electro cardiograms and the recognition of speech pattems. The next five chapters deal with the syntactic recognition of two-dimensional pictorial pattems."

Since its publication in 1976, the original volume has been warmly received. We have decided to put out this updated paperback edition so that the book can be more accessible to students. This paperback edition is essentially the same as the original hardcover volume except for the addition of a new chapter (Chapter 7) which reviews the recent advances in pattern recognition and image processing. Because of the limitations of length, we can only report the highlights and point the readers to the literature. A few typographical errors in the original edition were corrected. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research for supporting the editing of this book as well as the work described in Chapter 4 and a part of Chapter 7. West Lafayette, Indiana March 1980 K. S. Fu Preface to the First Edition During the past fifteen years there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition. Contributions to the blossom of this area have come from many disciplines, including statistics, psychology, linguistics, computer science, biology, taxonomy, switching theory, communication theory, control theory, and operations research. Many different approaches have been proposed and a number of books have been published. Most books published so far deal with the decision-theoretic (or statistical) approach or the syntactic (or linguistic) is still far from its maturity, many approach.