The 1985 Amsterdam conference brought together researchers active in pattern recognition methodology and the development of practical applications. The first part of the book covers various methodological aspects of image processing, knowledge based and model driven image understanding systems, 3-D reconstruction methods, and application oriented papers. Part II deals with aspects of statistical pattern recognition, the problem of population classification, and topics common to both pattern recognition and artificial intelligence.

This book is the outcome of a NATO Advanced Study Institute on Pattern Recog nition Theory and Applications held in Spa-Balmoral, Belgium, in June 1986. This Institute was the third of a series which started in 1975 in Bandol, France, at the initia tive of Professors K. S. Fu and A. Whinston, and continued in 1981 in Oxford, UK, with Professors K. S. Fu, J. Kittler and L. -F. Pau as directors. As early as in 1981, plans were made to pursue the series in about 1986 and possibly in Belgium, with Professor K. S. Fu and the present editors as directors. Unfortunately, Ie sort en decida autrement: Professor Fu passed away in the spring of 1985. His sudden death was an irreparable loss to the scientific community and to all those who knew him as an inspiring colleague, a teacher or a dear friend. Soon after, Josef Kittler and I decided to pay a small tribute to his memory by helping some of his plans to materialize. With the support of the NATO Scientific Affairs Division, the Institute became a reality. It was therefore but natural that the proceedings of the Institute be dedicated to him. The book contains most of the papers that were presented at the Institute. Papers are grouped along major themes which hopefully represent the major areas of contem porary research. These are: 1. Statistical methods and clustering techniques 2. Probabilistic relaxation techniques 3. From Markovian to connectionist models 4.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the conference ‘ Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice’ (IFIP AI 2008), which formed part of the 20th World Computer Congress of IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing (WCC-2008), in Milan, Italy in September 2008. The conference is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (Technical Committee 12) and its Working Group 12.5 (Artificial Intelligence Applications). All papers were reviewed by at least two members of our Program Committee. Final decisions were made by the Executive Program Committee, which comprised John Debenham (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia), Ilias Maglogiannis (University of Aegean, Samos, Greece), Eunika Mercier-Laurent (KIM, France) and myself. The best papers were selected for the conference, either as long papers (maximum 10 pages) or as short papers (maximum 5 pages) and are included in this volume. The international nature of IFIP is amply reflected in the large number of countries represented here. The conference also featured invited talks by Prof. Nikola Kasabov (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand) and Prof. Lorenza Saitta (University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy). I should like to thank the conference chair, John Debenham for all his efforts and the members of our program committee for reviewing papers to a very tight deadline.

Thirty years ago pattern recognition was dominated by the learning machine concept: that one could automate the process of going from the raw data to a classifier. The derivation of numerical features from the input image was not considered an important step. One could present all possible features to a program which in turn could find which ones would be useful for pattern recognition. In spite of significant improvements in statistical inference techniques, progress was slow. It became clear that feature derivation was a very complex process that could not be automated and that features could be symbolic as well as numerical. Furthennore the spatial relationship amongst features might be important. It appeared that pattern recognition might resemble language analysis since features could play the role of symbols strung together to form a word. This led. to the genesis of syntactic pattern recognition, pioneered in the middle and late 1960's by Russel Kirsch, Robert Ledley, Nararimhan, and Allan Shaw. However the thorough investigation of the area was left to King-Sun Fu and his students who, until his untimely death, produced most of the significant papers in this area. One of these papers (syntactic recognition of fingerprints) received the distinction of being selected as the best paper published that year in the IEEE Transaction on Computers. Therefore syntactic pattern recognition has a long history of active research and has been used in industrial applications.

In contrast with previous books on mechatronics and machine vision in practice, a significant number of chapters focus on systems designed for human interaction and deciphering human motion. Examples illustrate assistive actuation of hip joints, the augmentation of touch sense in artificial hand prostheses and helping stroke survivors in repetitive motion therapy. Interactive mechatronics and the experience of developing machine interfaces has enabled an examination of how we use mechatronics in the service of training, and even to consider why computer games perhaps appear to capture attention so much more readily than a human instructor! Mechatronics continues to be an exciting and developing field. It is now an essential part of our world and living experience. This and the previous books in this series illustrate the journey in developing the use of mechatronics so far. We anticipate that you will find the chapters here an equal source of inspiration for new devices to solve the challenges of new applications, and of course as a resource for teaching and inspiring the new generation of mechatronics engineers.

The very significant advances in computer vision and pattern recognition and their applications in the last few years reflect the strong and growing interest in the field as well as the many opportunities and challenges it offers. The second edition of this handbook represents both the latest progress and updated knowledge in this dynamic field. The applications and technological issues are particularly emphasized in this edition to reflect the wide applicability of the field in many practical problems. To keep the book in a single volume, it is not possible to retain all chapters of the first edition. However, the chapters of both editions are well written for permanent reference.

With the growing complexity of pattern recognition related problems being solved using Artificial Neural Networks, many ANN researchers are grappling with design issues such as the size of the network, the number of training patterns, and performance assessment and bounds. These researchers are continually rediscovering that many learning procedures lack the scaling property; the procedures simply fail, or yield unsatisfactory results when applied to problems of bigger size. Phenomena like these are very familiar to researchers in statistical pattern recognition (SPR), where the curse of dimensionality is a well-known dilemma. Issues related to the training and test sample sizes, feature space dimensionality, and the discriminatory power of different classifier types have all been extensively studied in the SPR literature. It appears however that many ANN researchers looking at pattern recognition problems are not aware of the ties between their field and SPR, and are therefore unable to successfully exploit work that has already been done in SPR. Similarly, many pattern recognition and computer vision researchers do not realize the potential of the ANN approach to solve problems such as feature extraction, segmentation, and object recognition. The present volume is designed as a contribution to the greater interaction between the ANN and SPR research communities.

This book is currently the only one on this subject containing both introductory material and advanced recent research results. It presents, at one end, fundamental concepts and notations developed in syntactic and structural pattern recognition and at the other, reports on the current state of the art with respect to both methodology and applications. In particular, it includes artificial intelligence related techniques, which are likely to become very important in future pattern recognition.The book consists of individual chapters written by different authors. The chapters are grouped into broader subject areas like “Syntactic Representation and Parsing”, “Structural Representation and Matching”, “Learning”, etc. Each chapter is a self-contained presentation of one particular topic. In order to keep the original flavor of each contribution, no efforts were undertaken to unify the different chapters with respect to notation. Naturally, the self-containedness of the individual chapters results in some redundancy. However, we believe that this handicap is compensated by the fact that each contribution can be read individually without prior study of the preceding chapters. A unification of the spectrum of material covered by the individual chapters is provided by the subject and author index included at the end of the book.

Clustering is an important unsupervised classification technique where data points are grouped such that points that are similar in some sense belong to the same cluster. Cluster analysis is a complex problem as a variety of similarity and dissimilarity measures exist in the literature. This is the first book focused on clustering with a particular emphasis on symmetry-based measures of similarity and metaheuristic approaches. The aim is to find a suitable grouping of the input data set so that some criteria are optimized, and using this the authors frame the clustering problem as an optimization one where the objectives to be optimized may represent different characteristics such as compactness, symmetrical compactness, separation between clusters, or connectivity within a cluster. They explain the techniques in detail and outline many detailed applications in data mining, remote sensing and brain imaging, gene expression data analysis, and face detection. The book will be useful to graduate students and researchers in computer science, electrical engineering, system science, and information technology, both as a text and as a reference book. It will also be useful to researchers and practitioners in industry working on pattern recognition, data mining, soft computing, metaheuristics, bioinformatics, remote sensing, and brain imaging.

Since its genesis more than thirty-five years ago, the field of computer vision has been known by various names, including pattern recognitions, image analysis, and image understanding. The central problem of computer vision is obtaining descriptive information by computer analysis of images of a scene. Together with the related fields of image processing and computer graphics, it has become an established discipline at the interface between computer science and electrical engineering. This volume contains fourteen papers presented at the AMS Special Session on Geometry Related to Computer Vision, held in Hoboken, New Jersey in Ooctober 1989. This book makes the results presented at the Special Session, which previously had been available only in the computer science literature, more widely available within the mathematical sciences community. Geometry plays a major role in computer vision since scene descriptions always involve geometrical properties of, and relations among, the objects of surfaces in the scene. The papers in this book provide a good sampling of geometric problems connected with computer vision. They deal with digital lines and curves, polygons, shape decompositions, digital connectedness and surfaces, digital metrics, and generalizations to higher-dimensional and graph-structured "spaces". Aimed at computer scientists specializing in image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition - as well as mathematicians interested in applications to computer science - this book will provide readers with a view of how geometry is currently being applied to problems in computer vision.