This book includes the proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2006) held on September 10-14, 2006 in Athens, Greece, with tutorials being presented on September 10, the main conference taking place during September 11-13 and accompanying workshops on perception, cognition and interaction held on September 14, 2006. The ICANN conference is organized annually by the European Neural Network Society in cooperation with the International Neural Network Society, the Japanese Neural Network Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. It is the premier European event covering all topics concerned with neural networks and related areas. The ICANN series of conferences was initiated in 1991 and soon became the major European gathering for experts in these fields. In 2006 the ICANN Conference was organized by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens in Athens, Greece. From 475 papers submitted to the conference, the International Program Committee selected, following a thorough peer-review process, 208 papers for publication and presentation to 21 regular and 10 special sessions. The quality of the papers received was in general very high; as a consequence, it was not possible to accept and include in the conference program many papers of good quality.
