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From facial recognition to self-driving cars, the applications of computer vision are vast and ever-expanding. Geometry plays a fundamental role in this discipline, providing the necessary mathematical framework to understand the underlying principles of how we perceive and interpret visual information in the world around us. This text explores the theories and computational techniques used to determine the geometric properties of solid objects through images. It covers the basic concepts and provides the necessary mathematical background for more advanced studies. The book is divided into clear and concise chapters covering a wide range of topics including image formation, camera models, feature detection and 3D reconstruction. Each chapter includes detailed explanations of the theory as well as practical examples to help the reader understand and apply the concepts presented. The book has been written with the intention of being used as a primary resource for students on university courses in computer vision, particularly final year undergraduate or postgraduate computer science or engineering courses. It is also useful for self-study and for those who, outside the academic field, find themselves applying computer vision to solve practical problems. The aim of the book is to strike a balance between the complexity of the theory and its practical applicability in terms of implementation. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, it offers a selection of specific methods with enough detail to enable the reader to implement them.

The 4-volume set LNAI 13935 - 13938 constitutes the proceedings of the 27th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2023, which took place in Osaka, Japan during May 25–28, 2023.The 143 papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 813 submissions. They deal with new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all KDD related areas, including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, databases, statistics, knowledge engineering, big data technologies, and foundations.

The multi-volume set LNAI 12975 until 12979 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2021, which was held during September 13-17, 2021. The conference was originally planned to take place in Bilbao, Spain, but changed to an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 210 full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 869 submissions. The volumes are organized in topical sections as follows: Research Track: Part I: Online learning; reinforcement learning; time series, streams, and sequence models; transfer and multi-task learning; semi-supervised and few-shot learning; learning algorithms and applications. Part II: Generative models; algorithms and learning theory; graphs and networks; interpretation, explainability, transparency, safety. Part III: Generative models; search and optimization; supervised learning; text mining and natural language processing; image processing, computer vision and visual analytics. Applied Data Science Track: Part IV: Anomaly detection and malware; spatio-temporal data; e-commerce and finance; healthcare and medical applications (including Covid); mobility and transportation. Part V: Automating machine learning, optimization, and feature engineering; machine learning based simulations and knowledge discovery; recommender systems and behavior modeling; natural language processing; remote sensing, image and video processing; social media.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Geometric Science of Information, GSI 2021, held in Paris, France, in July 2021.The 98 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. They cover all the main topics and highlights in the domain of geometric science of information, including information geometry manifolds of structured data/information and their advanced applications. The papers are organized in the following topics: Probability and statistics on Riemannian Manifolds; sub-Riemannian geometry and neuromathematics; shapes spaces; geometry of quantum states; geometric and structure preserving discretizations; information geometry in physics; Lie group machine learning; geometric and symplectic methods for hydrodynamical models; harmonic analysis on Lie groups; statistical manifold and Hessian information geometry; geometric mechanics; deformed entropy, cross-entropy, and relative entropy; transformation information geometry; statistics, information and topology; geometric deep learning; topological and geometrical structures in neurosciences; computational information geometry; manifold and optimization; divergence statistics; optimal transport and learning; and geometric structures in thermodynamics and statistical physics.

The two-volume set LNCS 12572 and 1273 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 27th International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling, MMM 2021, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in June2021. Of the 211 submitted regular papers, 40 papers were selected for oral presentation and 33 for poster presentation; 16 special session papers were accepted as well as 2 papers for a demo presentation and 17 papers for participation at the Video Browser Showdown 2021. The papers cover topics such as: multimedia indexing; multimedia mining; multimedia abstraction and summarization; multimedia annotation, tagging and recommendation; multimodal analysis for retrieval applications; semantic analysis of multimedia and contextual data; multimedia fusion methods; multimedia hyperlinking; media content browsing and retrieval tools; media representation and algorithms; audio, image, video processing, coding and compression; multimedia sensors and interaction modes; multimedia privacy, security and content protection; multimedia standards and related issues; advances in multimedia networking and streaming; multimedia databases, content delivery and transport; wireless and mobile multimedia networking; multi-camera and multi-view systems; augmented and virtual reality, virtual environments; real-time and interactive multimedia applications; mobile multimedia applications; multimedia web applications; multimedia authoring and personalization; interactive multimedia and interfaces; sensor networks; social and educational multimedia applications; and emerging trends.

The 3-volume set LNAI 12712-12714 constitutes the proceedings of the 25th Pacific-Asia Conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2021, which was held during May 11-14, 2021.The 157 papers included in the proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 628 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Applications of knowledge discovery and data mining of specialized data; Part II: Classical data mining; data mining theory and principles; recommender systems; and text analytics; Part III: Representation learning and embedding, and learning from data.

The 4-volume set LNCS 13019, 13020, 13021 and 13022 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, PRCV 2021, held in Beijing, China, in October-November 2021. The 201 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 513 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Object Detection, Tracking and Recognition; Computer Vision, Theories and Applications, Multimedia Processing and Analysis; Low-level Vision and Image Processing; Biomedical Image Processing and Analysis; Machine Learning, Neural Network and Deep Learning, and New Advances in Visual Perception and Understanding.

This book gives a comprehensive view of the developed procrustes models, including the isotropic, the generalized and the anisotropic variants. These represent original tools to perform, among others, the bundle block adjustment and the global registration of multiple 3D LiDAR point clouds. Moreover, the book also reports the recently derived total least squares solution of the anisotropic Procrustes model, together with its practical application in solving the exterior orientation of one image. The book is aimed at all those interested in discovering valuable innovative algorithms for solving various photogrammetric computer vision problems. In this context, where functional models are non-linear, Procrustean methods prove to be powerful since they do not require any linearization nor approximated values of the unknown parameters, furnishing at the same time results comparable in terms of accuracy with those given by the state-of-the-art methods.

The book covers a comprehensive overview of the theory, methods, applications and tools of cognition and recognition. The book is a collection of best selected papers presented in the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition 2016 (ICCR 2016) and helpful for scientists and researchers in the field of image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision for advance studies. Nowadays, researchers are working in interdisciplinary areas and the proceedings of ICCR 2016 plays a major role to accumulate those significant works at one place. The chapters included in the proceedings inculcates both theoretical as well as practical aspects of different areas like nature inspired algorithms, fuzzy systems, data mining, signal processing, image processing, text processing, wireless sensor networks, network security and cellular automata.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Joint IAPR International Workshop on Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, S+SSPR 2018, held in Beijing, China, in August 2018.The 49 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: classification and clustering; deep learning and neurla networks; dissimilarity representations and Gaussian processes; semi and fully supervised learning methods; spatio-temporal pattern recognition and shape analysis; structural matching; multimedia analysis and understanding; and graph-theoretic methods.

The eight-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 9905-9912 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2016, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2016. The 415 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1480 submissions. The papers cover all aspects of computer vision and pattern recognition such as 3D computer vision; computational photography, sensing and display; face and gesture; low-level vision and image processing; motion and tracking; optimization methods; physics-based vision, photometry and shape-from-X; recognition: detection, categorization, indexing, matching; segmentation, grouping and shape representation; statistical methods and learning; video: events, activities and surveillance; applications. They are organized in topical sections on detection, recognition and retrieval; scene understanding; optimization; image and video processing; learning; action, activity and tracking; 3D; and 9 poster sessions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Mining Intelligence and Knowledge Exploration, MIKE 2015, held in Hyderabad, India, in December 2015. The 48 full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 4 doctoral consortium papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including information retrieval, machine learning, pattern recognition, knowledge discovery, classification, clustering, image processing, network security, speech processing, natural language processing, language, cognition and computation, fuzzy sets, and business intelligence.

The two-volume set LNCS 9279 and 9280 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, ICIAP 2015, held in Genoa, Italy, in September 2015. The 129 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 231 submissions. The papers are organized in the following seven topical sections: video analysis and understanding, multiview geometry and 3D computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, image analysis, detection and recognition, shape analysis and modeling, multimedia, and biomedical applications.

The four-volume set LNCS 8925, 8926, 8927, and 8928 comprises the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Workshops that took place in conjunction with the 13th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2014, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2014.The 203 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. They where presented at workshops with the following themes: where computer vision meets art; computer vision in vehicle technology; spontaneous facial behavior analysis; consumer depth cameras for computer vision;'chalearn'looking at people: pose, recovery, action/interaction, gesture recognition; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval towards big data; computer vision with local binary pattern variants; visual object tracking challenge; computer vision + ontology applies cross-disciplinary technologies; visual perception of affordance and functional visual primitives for scene analysis; graphical models in computer vision; light fields for computer vision; computer vision for road scene understanding and autonomous driving; soft biometrics; transferring and adapting source knowledge in computer vision; surveillance and re-identification; color and photometry in computer vision; assistive computer vision and robotics; computer vision problems in plant phenotyping; and non-rigid shape analysis and deformable image alignment. Additionally, a panel discussion on video segmentation is included.

The first book of its kind dedicated to the challenge of person re-identification, this text provides an in-depth, multidisciplinary discussion of recent developments and state-of-the-art methods. Features: introduces examples of robust feature representations, reviews salient feature weighting and selection mechanisms and examines the benefits of semantic attributes; describes how to segregate meaningful body parts from background clutter; examines the use of 3D depth images and contextual constraints derived from the visual appearance of a group; reviews approaches to feature transfer function and distance metric learning and discusses potential solutions to issues of data scalability and identity inference; investigates the limitations of existing benchmark datasets, presents strategies for camera topology inference and describes techniques for improving post-rank search efficiency; explores the design rationale and implementation considerations of building a practical re-identification system.

The seven-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 8689-8695 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2014, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2014.The 363 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1444 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on tracking and activity recognition; recognition; learning and inference; structure from motion and feature matching; computational photography and low-level vision; vision; segmentation and saliency; context and 3D scenes; motion and 3D scene analysis; and poster sessions.

This Springer Brief represents a comprehensive review of information theoretic methods for robust recognition. A variety of information theoretic methods have been proffered in the past decade, in a large variety of computer vision applications; this work brings them together, attempts to impart the theory, optimization and usage of information entropy.The authors resort to a new information theoretic concept, correntropy, as a robust measure and apply it to solve robust face recognition and object recognition problems. For computational efficiency, the brief introduces the additive and multiplicative forms of half-quadratic optimization to efficiently minimize entropy problems and a two-stage sparse presentation framework for large scale recognition problems. It also describes the strengths and deficiencies of different robust measures in solving robust recognition problems.

Artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms both are areas of research which have their origins in mathematical models constructed in order to gain understanding of important natural processes. By focussing on the process models rather than the processes themselves, significant new computational techniques have evolved which have found application in a large number of diverse fields. This diversity is reflected in the topics which are the subjects of contributions to this volume. There are contributions reporting theoretical developments in the design of neural networks, and in the management of their learning. In a number of contributions, applications to speech recognition tasks, control of industrial processes as well as to credit scoring, and so on, are reflected. Regarding genetic algorithms, several methodological papers consider how genetic algorithms can be improved using an experimental approach, as well as by hybridizing with other useful techniques such as tabu search. The closely related area of classifier systems also receives a significant amount of coverage, aiming at better ways for their implementation. Further, while there are many contributions which explore ways in which genetic algorithms can be applied to real problems, nearly all involve some understanding of the context in order to apply the genetic algorithm paradigm more successfully. That this can indeed be done is evidenced by the range of applications covered in this volume.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint IAPR International Workshops on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR 2012) and Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR 2012), held in Hiroshima, Japan, in November 2012 as a satellite event of the 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2012. The 80 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper and the Pierre Devijver award lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 120 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on structural, syntactical, and statistical pattern recognition, graph and tree methods, randomized methods and image analysis, kernel methods in structural and syntactical pattern recognition, applications of structural and syntactical pattern recognition, clustering, learning, kernel methods in statistical pattern recognition, kernel methods in statistical pattern recognition, as well as applications of structural, syntactical, and statistical methods.

Our homes anticipate when we want to wake up. Our computers predict what music we want to buy. Our cars adapt to the way we drive. In today's world, even washing machines, rice cookers and toys have the capability of autonomous decision-making. As we grow accustomed to computing power embedded in our surroundings, it becomes clear that these ‘smart environments', with a number of devices controlled by a coordinating system capable of ‘ambient intelligence', will play an ever larger role in our lives. This handbook provides readers with comprehensive, up-to-date coverage in what is a key technological field.. Systematically dealing with each aspect of ambient intelligence and smart environments, the text covers everything, from visual information capture and human/computer interaction to multi-agent systems, network use of sensor data, and building more rationality into artificial systems. The book also details a wide range of applications, examines case studies of recent major projects from around the world, and analyzes both the likely impact of the technology on our lives, and its ethical implications.With a wide variety of separate disciplines all conducting research relevant to this field, this handbook encourages collaboration between disparate researchers by setting out the fundamental concepts from each area that are relevant to ambient intelligence and smart environments, providing a fertile soil in which ground-breaking new work candevelop.

The 2010 edition of the European Conference on Computer Vision was held in Heraklion, Crete. The call for papers attracted an absolute record of 1,174 submissions. We describe here the selection of the accepted papers: Thirty-eight area chairs were selected coming from Europe (18), USA and Canada (16), and Asia (4). Their selection was based on the following criteria: (1) Researchers who had served at least two times as Area Chairs within the past two years at major vision conferences were excluded; (2) Researchers who served as Area Chairs at the 2010 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition were also excluded (exception: ECCV 2012 Program Chairs); (3) Minimization of overlap introduced by Area Chairs being former student and advisors; (4) 20% of the Area Chairs had never served before in a major conference; (5) The Area Chair selection process made all possible efforts to achieve a reasonable geographic distribution between countries, thematic areas and trends in computer vision. EachArea Chair was assigned by the Program Chairs between 28–32 papers. Based on paper content, the Area Chair recommended up to seven potential reviewers per paper. Such assignment was made using all reviewers in the database including the conflicting ones. The Program Chairs manually entered the missing conflict domains of approximately 300 reviewers. Based on the recommendation of the Area Chairs, three reviewers were selected per paper (with at least one being of the top three suggestions), with 99.

The 2010 edition of the European Conference on Computer Vision was held in Heraklion, Crete. The call for papers attracted an absolute record of 1,174 submissions. We describe here the selection of the accepted papers: Thirty-eight area chairs were selected coming from Europe (18), USA and Canada (16), and Asia (4). Their selection was based on the following criteria: (1) Researchers who had served at least two times as Area Chairs within the past two years at major vision conferences were excluded; (2) Researchers who served as Area Chairs at the 2010 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition were also excluded (exception: ECCV 2012 Program Chairs); (3) Minimization of overlap introduced by Area Chairs being former student and advisors; (4) 20% of the Area Chairs had never served before in a major conference; (5) The Area Chair selection process made all possible efforts to achieve a reasonable geographic distribution between countries, thematic areas and trends in computer vision. EachArea Chair was assigned by the Program Chairs between 28–32 papers. Based on paper content, the Area Chair recommended up to seven potential reviewers per paper. Such assignment was made using all reviewers in the database including the conflicting ones. The Program Chairs manually entered the missing conflict domains of approximately 300 reviewers. Based on the recommendation of the Area Chairs, three reviewers were selected per paper (with at least one being of the top three suggestions), with 99.

The First Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2009) was held at Nanjing, China during November 2–4, 2009.This was the?rst edition of a series of annual conferences which aim to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related?elds to share their new ideas and research?ndings. This year we received 113 submissions from 18 countries and regions in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. The submissions went through a r- orous double-blind reviewing process. Most submissions received four reviews, a few submissions received?ve reviews, while only several submissions received three reviews. Each submission was handled by an Area Chair who coordinated discussions among reviewers and made recommendation on the submission. The Program Committee Chairs examined the reviews and meta-reviews to further guarantee the reliability and integrity of the reviewing process. Twenty-nine - pers were selected after this process. To ensure that important revisions required by reviewers were incorporated into the?nal accepted papers, and to allow submissions which would have - tential after a careful revision, this year we launched a “revision double-check” process. In short, the above-mentioned 29 papers were conditionally accepted, and the authors were requested to incorporate the “important-and-must”re- sionssummarizedbyareachairsbasedonreviewers'comments.Therevised?nal version and the revision list of each conditionally accepted paper was examined by the Area Chair and Program Committee Chairs. Papers that failed to pass the examination were?nally rejected.

This book is an outcome of the LIX Fall Colloquium on the Emerging Trends in Visual Computing, ETVC 2008, which was held in Palaiseau, France, November 18-20, 2008. During the event, 25 renowned invited speakers gave lectures on their areas of expertise within the field of visual computing. From these talks, a total of 15 state-of-the-art articles have been assembled in this volume. All articles were thoroughly reviewed and improved, according to the suggestions of the referees. The 15 contributions presented in this state-of-the-art survey are organized in topical sections on: geometric computing, information geometry and applications, computer graphics and vision, information retrieval, and medical imaging and computational anatomy. They are preceded by the abstracts of the talks given at ETVC 2008.

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the Third Inter- tional Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology (RSKT 2008) held in Chengdu, P. R. China, May 16–19, 2008. The RSKT conferences were initiated in 2006 in Chongqing, P. R. China. RSKT 2007 was held in Toronto, Canada, together with RSFDGrC 2007, as JRS 2007. The RSKT conferences aim to present state-of-the-art scienti?c - sults, encourage academic and industrial interaction, and promote collaborative research in rough sets and knowledge technology worldwide. They place emphasis on exploring synergies between rough sets and knowledge discovery, knowledge management, data mining, granular and soft computing as well as emerging application areas such as bioinformatics, cognitive informatics, and Web intel- gence, both at the level of theoretical foundations and real-life applications. RSKT 2008 focused on?ve major research?elds: computing theory and paradigms, knowledge technology, intelligent information processing, intelligent control, and applications. This was achieved by including in the conference program sessions on rough and soft computing, rough mereology with app- cations, dominance-based rough set approach, fuzzy-rough hybridization, gr- ular computing, logical and mathematical foundations, formal concept analysis, data mining, machine learning, intelligent information processing, bioinform- ics and cognitive informatics, Web intelligence, pattern recognition, and real-life applications of knowledge technology. A very strict quality control policy was adopted in the paper review process of RSKT 2008. Firstly, the PC Chairs - viewed all submissions.

The four-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 5302/5303/5304/5305 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2008, held in Marseille, France, in October 2008. The 243 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 871 papers submitted. The four books cover the entire range of current issues in computer vision. The papers are organized in topical sections on recognition, stereo, people and face recognition, object tracking, matching, learning and features, MRFs, segmentation, computational photography and active reconstruction.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong – 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the n- ber of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, thereports,thereviews,andtheresponsesweremadeavailabletotheauthorsas well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not re?ected in the?nal decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. ThepreparationofECCV2004wentsmoothlythankstothee?ortsofthe- ganizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong – 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the n- ber of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, thereports,thereviews,andtheresponsesweremadeavailabletotheauthorsas well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not re?ected in the?nal decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. ThepreparationofECCV2004wentsmoothlythankstothee?ortsofthe- ganizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong – 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the n- ber of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, thereports,thereviews,andtheresponsesweremadeavailabletotheauthorsas well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not re?ected in the?nal decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. ThepreparationofECCV2004wentsmoothlythankstothee?ortsofthe- ganizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong – 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the n- ber of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, thereports,thereviews,andtheresponsesweremadeavailabletotheauthorsas well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not re?ected in the?nal decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. ThepreparationofECCV2004wentsmoothlythankstothee?ortsofthe- ganizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague.

ICIAR 2004, the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, was the?rst ICIAR conference, and was held in Porto, Portugal. ICIAR will be organized annually, and will alternate between Europe and North America. ICIAR 2005 will take place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The idea of o?ering these conferences came as a result of discussion between researchers in Portugal and Canada to encourage collaboration and exchange, mainly between these two countries, but also with the open participation of other countries, addressing recent advances in theory, methodology and applications. The response to the call for papers for ICIAR 2004 was very positive. From 316 full papers submitted, 210 were accepted (97 oral presentations, and 113 - sters). The review process was carried out by the Program Committee members and other reviewers; all are experts in various image analysis and recognition areas. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewing parties. The high q- lity of the papers in these proceedings is attributed?rst to the authors, and second to the quality of the reviews provided by the experts. We would like to thank the authors for responding to our call, and we wholeheartedly thank the reviewers for their excellent work in such a short amount of time. We are espe- ally indebted to the Program Committee for their e?orts that allowed us to set up this publication. We were very pleased to be able to include in the conference, Prof. Murat KuntfromtheSwissFederalInstituteofTechnology,andProf. Mario ´ Figueiredo, oftheInstitutoSuperiorT´ ecnico,inPortugal.