This volume contains 18 papers of high quality, selected to represent the work that is being developed by Spanish research groups in pattern recognition and image analysis. It is partly the result of the efforts of the Spanish Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI). It is hoped that this volume will increase awareness of Spanish work in the international scientific community and initiate contacts with research groups worldwide.Sample Chapter(s)

One of the series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence, this book covers subjects including the Harvard binocular head; heads, eyes, and head-eye systems; a binocular robot head with torsional eye movements; and escape and dodging behaviours for reactive control.

To fully appreciate new methods developed in the area of machine vision it is necessary to have facilities which allow experimental verification of such methods. Experimental research is typically a very expensive task in terms of manpower, and consequently it is desirable to adopt standard facilities/methods which allow more efficient experimental investigations. In this volume a range of different experimental environments which facilitate construction and integration of machine vision systems is described. The environments presented cover areas such as robotics, research in individual machine vision methods, system integration, knowledge representation, and distributed computing. The set of environments covered include commercial systems, public domain software and laboratory prototype, showing the diversity of the problem of experimental research in machine vision and providing the reader with an overview of the area.

This volume deals with the following topics: 2-D, 3-D automata and grammars, parallel architecture for image processing, parallel digital geometry algorithms, data allocation strategies for parallel image processing algorithms, complexity analysis of parallel image operators. The contributions are written by leading experts in the fields of models, algorithms and architectures for parallel image processing.

This book was conceived from the realization that there was a need to update recent work on invariants in a single volume providing a useful set of references and pointers to related work. Since the publication in 1992 of J L Mundy and A Zisserman's Geometric Invariance in Computer Vision, the subject has been evolving rapidly. New approaches to invariants have been proposed and novel ways of defining and applying invariants to practical problem solving are testimony to the fundamental importance of the study of invariants to machine vision. This book represents a snapshot of current research around the world.A version of this collection of papers has appeared in the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (December 1999). The papers in this book are extended versions of the original material published in the journal. They are organized into two categories: foundations and applications. Foundation papers present new ways of defining or analyzing invariants, and application papers present novel ways in which known invariant theory is extended and effectively applied to real-world problems in interesting and difficult contexts. Each category contains roughly half of the papers, but there is considerable overlap. All papers carry an element of novelty and generalization that will be useful to theoreticians and practitioners alike. It is hoped that this volume will be not only useful but also inspirational to researchers in image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision at large.

Texture analysis is an important generic research area of machine vision. The potential areas of application include biomedical image analysis, industrial inspection, analysis of satellite or aerial imagery, content-based retrieval from image databases, document analysis, biometric person authentication, scene analysis for robot navigation, texture synthesis for computer graphics and animation, and image coding. Texture analysis has been a topic of intensive research for over three decades, but the progress has been very slow.A workshop on “Texture Analysis in Machine Vision” was held at the University of Oulu, Finland, in 1999, providing a forum for presenting recent research results and for discussing how to make progress in order to increase the usefulness of texture in practical applications. This book contains extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the workshop. The first part of the book deals with texture analysis methodology, while the second part covers various applications. The book gives a unique view of different approaches and applications of texture analysis. It should be of great interest both to researchers of machine vision and to practitioners in various application areas.

Agent engineering concerns the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science and engineering.This book addresses some of the key issues in agent engineering: What is meant by “autonomous agents”? How can we build agents with autonomy? What are the desirable capabilities of agents with respect to surviving (they will not die) and living (they will furthermore enjoy their being or existence)? How can agents cooperate among themselves? In order to achieve the optimal performance at the global level, how much optimization at the local, individual level and how much at the global level would be necessary?

This updated compendium provides a methodical introduction with a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges, and applications. More than a third of this edition comprised of new materials, highlighting descriptions of the classic methods, and extensions and novel approaches that have recently been introduced.Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, the settings in which each method is applicable and the consequences and tradeoffs incurred by using the method is succinctly featured. R code for implementation of the algorithm is also emphasized.The unique volume provides researchers, students and practitioners in industry with a comprehensive, concise and convenient resource on ensemble learning methods.

In recent years, libraries and archives all around the world have increased their efforts to digitize historical manuscripts. To integrate the manuscripts into digital libraries, pattern recognition and machine learning methods are needed to extract and index the contents of the scanned images.The unique compendium describes the outcome of the HisDoc research project, a pioneering attempt to study the whole processing chain of layout analysis, handwriting recognition, and retrieval of historical manuscripts. This description is complemented with an overview of other related research projects, in order to convey the current state of the art in the field and outline future trends.This must-have volume is a relevant reference work for librarians, archivists and computer scientists.

Keyword Spotting (KWS) has been proposed as a flexible and more error-tolerant alternative to full transcriptions. In most cases, it allows to retrieve arbitrary query words in handwritten historical document.This comprehensive compendium gives a self-contained preamble and visually attractive description to the field of graph-based KWS. The volume highlights a profound insight into each step of the whole KWS pipeline, viz. image preprocessing, graph representation and graph matching.Written by two world-renowned co-authors, this unique title combines two very current research fields of graph-based pattern recognition and document analysis. The book serves as an attractive teaching material for graduate students, as well as a useful reference text for professionals, academics and researchers.

This unique compendium represents important action of fuzzy systems to quantum mechanics. From fuzzy sets to fuzzy systems, it also gives clear descriptions on the development on fuzzy logic, where the most important result is the probability presentation of fuzzy systems.The important conclusions on fuzzy systems are used in the study of quantum mechanics, which is a very new idea. Eight important conclusions are obtained. The author has proved that mass-point motions in classical mechanics must have waves, which means that any mass-point motion in classical mechanics has wave mass-point dualism as well as any microscopic particle motion must have wave-particle dualism. Based on this conclusion, it has been proven that classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are unified.

This compendium provides a detailed account of the lognormality principle characterizing the human motor behavior by summarizing a sound theoretical framework for modeling such a behavior, introducing the most recent algorithms for extracting the lognormal components of complex movements in 2, 2.5 and 3 dimensions. It also vividly reports the most advanced applications to handwriting analysis and recognition, signature and writer verification, gesture recognition and calligraphy generation, evaluation of motor skills, improvement/degradation with aging, handwriting learning, education and developmental deficits, prescreening of children with ADHD (Attention Development and Hyperactivity Disorder), monitoring of concussion recovery, diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and aging effects in speech and handwriting.The volume provides a unique and useful source of references on the lognormality principle, an update on the most recent advances and an outlook at the most promising future developments in e-Security, e-Learning and e-Health.

This 3rd edition tackles the basic principle of deep learning as well as the application of combination of wavelet theory with deep learning to pattern recognition. Five new chapters related to the combination of wavelet theory and deep learning are added with many novel research results.The useful reference text will benefit academics, researchers, computer scientists, electronic engineers and graduate students in the field of pattern recognition, image analysis, machine learning and electrical and electronic engineering.

Tomorrow's robots, which includes the humanoid robot, can perform task like tutoring children, working as tour guides, driving humans to and from work, do the family shopping etc. Tomorrow's robots will enhance lives in ways we never dreamed possible. No time to attend the decisive meeting on Asian strategy? Let your robot go for you and make the decisions. Not feeling well enough to go to the clinic? Let Dr Robot come to you, make a diagnosis, and get you the necessary medicine for treatment. No time to coach the soccer team this week? Let the robot do it for you.Tomorrow's robots will be the most exciting and revolutionary things to happen to the world since the invention of the automobile. It will change the way we work, play, think, and live. Because of this, nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific research. These days, robotics is offered in almost every university in the world. Most mechanical engineering departments offer a similar course at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. And increasingly, many computer and electrical engineering departments are also offering it.This book will guide you, the curious beginner, from yesterday to tomorrow. The book will cover practical knowledge in understanding, developing, and using robots as versatile equipment to automate a variety of industrial processes or tasks. But, the book will also discuss the possibilities we can look forward to when we are capable of creating a vision-guided, learning machine.

An inadequate infrastructure for software testing is causing major losses to the world economy. The characteristics of software quality problems are quite similar to other tasks successfully tackled by artificial intelligence techniques. The aims of this book are to present state-of-the-art applications of artificial intelligence and data mining methods to quality assurance of complex software systems, and to encourage further research in this important and challenging area.

Data Mining is the science and technology of exploring data in order to discover previously unknown patterns. It is a part of the overall process of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). The accessibility and abundance of information today makes data mining a matter of considerable importance and necessity. This book provides an introduction to the field with an emphasis on advanced decomposition methods in general data mining tasks and for classification tasks in particular. The book presents a complete methodology for decomposing classification problems into smaller and more manageable sub-problems that are solvable by using existing tools. The various elements are then joined together to solve the initial problem.The benefits of decomposition methodology in data mining include: increased performance (classification accuracy); conceptual simplification of the problem; enhanced feasibility for huge databases; clearer and more comprehensible results; reduced runtime by solving smaller problems and by using parallel/distributed computation; and the opportunity of using different techniques for individual sub-problems.

This book addresses the range image registration problem for automatic 3D model construction. The focus is on obtaining highly precise alignments between different view pairs of the same object to avoid 3D model distortions; in contrast to most prior work, the view pairs may exhibit relatively little overlap and need not be prealigned. To this end, a novel effective evaluation metric for registration, the Surface Interpenetration Measure (SIM) is defined. This measure quantifies the interleaving of two surfaces as their alignment is refined, putting the qualitative evaluation of “splotchiness,” often used in reference to renderings of the aligned surfaces, onto a solid mathematical footing. The SIM is shown to be superior to mean squared error (i.e. more sensitive to fine scale changes) in controlling the final stages of the alignment process.The authors go on to combine the SIM with Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to develop a robust approach for range image registration. The results confirm that this technique achieves precise surface registration with no need for prealignment, as opposed to methods based on the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, the most popular to date. Thorough experimental results including an extensive comparative study are presented and enhanced GA-based approaches to improve the registration still further are proposed. The authors also develop a global multiview registration technique using the GA-based approach. The results show considerable promise in terms of accuracy for 3D modeling.

Software systems surround us. Software is a critical component in everything from the family car through electrical power systems to military equipment. As software plays an ever-increasing role in our lives and livelihoods, the quality of that software becomes more and more critical. However, our ability to deliver high-quality software has not kept up with those increasing demands. The economic fallout is enormous; the US economy alone is losing over US$50 billion per year due to software failures. This book presents new research into using advanced artificial intelligence techniques to guide software quality improvements. The techniques of chaos theory and data mining are brought to bear to provide new insights into the software development process. Written for researchers and practitioners in software engineering and computational intelligence, this book is a unique and important bridge between these two fields.

This book describes exciting new opportunities for utilizing robust graph representations of data with common machine learning algorithms. Graphs can model additional information which is often not present in commonly used data representations, such as vectors. Through the use of graph distance — a relatively new approach for determining graph similarity — the authors show how well-known algorithms, such as k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors classification, can be easily extended to work with graphs instead of vectors. This allows for the utilization of additional information found in graph representations, while at the same time employing well-known, proven algorithms.To demonstrate and investigate these novel techniques, the authors have selected the domain of web content mining, which involves the clustering and classification of web documents based on their textual substance. Several methods of representing web document content by graphs are introduced; an interesting feature of these representations is that they allow for a polynomial time distance computation, something which is typically an NP-complete problem when using graphs. Experimental results are reported for both clustering and classification in three web document collections using a variety of graph representations, distance measures, and algorithm parameters.In addition, this book describes several other related topics, many of which provide excellent starting points for researchers and students interested in exploring this new area of machine learning further. These topics include creating graph-based multiple classifier ensembles through random node selection and visualization of graph-based data using multidimensional scaling.

As became apparent after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, terrorist groups are increasingly using the Internet as a communication and propaganda tool where they can safely communicate with their affiliates, coordinate action plans, raise funds, and introduce new supporters to their networks. This is evident from the large number of web sites run by different terrorist organizations, though the URLs and geographical locations of these web sites are frequently moved around the globe. The wide use of the Internet by terrorists makes some people think that the risk of a major cyber-attack against the communication infrastructure is low. However, this situation may change abruptly once the terrorists decide that the Net does not serve their purposes anymore and, like any other invention of our civilization, deserves destruction.Fighting Terror in Cyberspace is a unique volume, which provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of terrorist threats in cyberspace along with state-of-the-art tools and technologies that can deal with these threats in the present and in the future. The book covers several key topics in cyber warfare such as terrorist use of the Internet, the Cyber Jihad, data mining tools and techniques of terrorist detection on the web, analysis and detection of terror financing, and automated identification of terrorist web sites in multiple languages. The contributors include leading researchers on international terrorism, as well as distinguished experts in information security and cyber intelligence. This book represents a valuable source of information for academic researchers, law enforcement and intelligence experts, and industry consultants who are involved in detection, analysis, and prevention of terrorist activities on the Internet.

This book provides a fundamentally new approach to pattern recognition in which objects are characterized by relations to other objects instead of by using features or models. This 'dissimilarity representation' bridges the gap between the traditionally opposing approaches of statistical and structural pattern recognition.Physical phenomena, objects and events in the world are related in various and often complex ways. Such relations are usually modeled in the form of graphs or diagrams. While this is useful for communication between experts, such representation is difficult to combine and integrate by machine learning procedures. However, if the relations are captured by sets of dissimilarities, general data analysis procedures may be applied for analysis.With their detailed description of an unprecedented approach absent from traditional textbooks, the authors have crafted an essential book for every researcher and systems designer studying or developing pattern recognition systems.

This is the first comprehensive book dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining and covers all aspects of this important technique.Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining, the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. The area is of great importance because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from the abundance of data available. Both theoreticians and practitioners are continually seeking techniques to make the process more efficient, cost-effective and accurate. Decision trees, originally implemented in decision theory and statistics, are highly effective tools in other areas such as data mining, text mining, information extraction, machine learning, and pattern recognition. This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer: Self-explanatory and easy to follow when compacted; Able to handle a variety of input data: nominal, numeric and textual; Able to process datasets that may have errors or missing values; High predictive performance for a relatively small computational effort; Available in many data mining packages over a variety of platforms; Useful for various tasks, such as classification, regression, clustering and feature selection;

This book is a collection of scientific papers published during the last five years, showing a broad spectrum of actual research topics and techniques used to solve challenging problems in the areas of computer vision and image analysis. The book will appeal to researchers, technicians and graduate students.

This book introduces SpecDB, an intelligent database created to represent and host software specifications in a machine-readable format, based on the principles of artificial intelligence and unit testing database operations. SpecDB is demonstrated via two automated intelligent tools. The first automatically generates database constraints from a rule-base in SpecDB. The second is a reverse engineering tool that logs the actual execution of the program from the code.

This compendium is a completely revised version of an earlier book, Data Mining in Time Series Databases, by the same editors. It provides a unique collection of new articles written by leading experts that account for the latest developments in the field of time series and data stream mining.The emerging topics covered by the book include weightless neural modeling for mining data streams, using ensemble classifiers for imbalanced and evolving data streams, document stream mining with active learning, and many more. In particular, it addresses the domain of streaming data, which has recently become one of the emerging topics in Data Science, Big Data, and related areas. Existing titles do not provide sufficient information on this topic.

The compendium presents the latest results of the most prominent competitions held in the field of Document Analysis and Text Recognition. It includes a description of the participating systems and the underlying methods on one hand and the datasets used together with evaluation metrics on the other hand. This volume also demonstrates with examples, how to organize a competition and how to make it successful. It will be an indispensable handbook to the document image analysis community.

A metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure designed to select a partial search algorithm that may lead to a good solution to an optimization problem, especially with incomplete or imperfect information.This unique compendium focuses on the insights of hybrid metaheuristics. It illustrates the recent researches on evolving novel hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, and prominently highlights its diverse application areas. As such, the book helps readers to grasp the essentials of hybrid metaheuristics and to address real world problems.The must-have volume serves as an inspiring read for professionals, researchers, academics and graduate students in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.Related Link(s);

Researchers from various disciplines such as pattern recognition, statistics, and machine learning have explored the use of ensemble methodology since the late seventies. Thus, they are faced with a wide variety of methods, given the growing interest in the field. This book aims to impose a degree of order upon this diversity by presenting a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges and applications.The book describes in detail the classical methods, as well as the extensions and novel approaches developed recently. Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, it also explains the circumstances in which this method is applicable and the consequences and the trade-offs incurred by using the method.

The 2nd edition is an update of the book Wavelet Theory and its Application to Pattern Recognition published in 2000. Three new chapters, which are research results conducted during 2001-2008, are added. The book consists of three parts — the first presents a brief survey of the status of pattern recognition with wavelet theory; the second contains the basic theory of wavelet analysis; the third includes applications of wavelet theory to pattern recognition. The new book provides a bibliography of 170 references including the current state-of-the-art theory and applications of wavelet analysis to pattern recognition.

This volume contains 18 papers of high quality, selected to represent the work that is being developed by Spanish research groups in pattern recognition and image analysis. It is partly the result of the efforts of the Spanish Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI). It is hoped that this volume will increase awareness of Spanish work in the international scientific community and initiate contacts with research groups worldwide.Sample Chapter(s)

One of the series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence, this book covers subjects including the Harvard binocular head; heads, eyes, and head-eye systems; a binocular robot head with torsional eye movements; and escape and dodging behaviours for reactive control.

To fully appreciate new methods developed in the area of machine vision it is necessary to have facilities which allow experimental verification of such methods. Experimental research is typically a very expensive task in terms of manpower, and consequently it is desirable to adopt standard facilities/methods which allow more efficient experimental investigations. In this volume a range of different experimental environments which facilitate construction and integration of machine vision systems is described. The environments presented cover areas such as robotics, research in individual machine vision methods, system integration, knowledge representation, and distributed computing. The set of environments covered include commercial systems, public domain software and laboratory prototype, showing the diversity of the problem of experimental research in machine vision and providing the reader with an overview of the area.

This volume deals with the following topics: 2-D, 3-D automata and grammars, parallel architecture for image processing, parallel digital geometry algorithms, data allocation strategies for parallel image processing algorithms, complexity analysis of parallel image operators. The contributions are written by leading experts in the fields of models, algorithms and architectures for parallel image processing.

This book was conceived from the realization that there was a need to update recent work on invariants in a single volume providing a useful set of references and pointers to related work. Since the publication in 1992 of J L Mundy and A Zisserman's Geometric Invariance in Computer Vision, the subject has been evolving rapidly. New approaches to invariants have been proposed and novel ways of defining and applying invariants to practical problem solving are testimony to the fundamental importance of the study of invariants to machine vision. This book represents a snapshot of current research around the world.A version of this collection of papers has appeared in the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (December 1999). The papers in this book are extended versions of the original material published in the journal. They are organized into two categories: foundations and applications. Foundation papers present new ways of defining or analyzing invariants, and application papers present novel ways in which known invariant theory is extended and effectively applied to real-world problems in interesting and difficult contexts. Each category contains roughly half of the papers, but there is considerable overlap. All papers carry an element of novelty and generalization that will be useful to theoreticians and practitioners alike. It is hoped that this volume will be not only useful but also inspirational to researchers in image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision at large.

Texture analysis is an important generic research area of machine vision. The potential areas of application include biomedical image analysis, industrial inspection, analysis of satellite or aerial imagery, content-based retrieval from image databases, document analysis, biometric person authentication, scene analysis for robot navigation, texture synthesis for computer graphics and animation, and image coding. Texture analysis has been a topic of intensive research for over three decades, but the progress has been very slow.A workshop on “Texture Analysis in Machine Vision” was held at the University of Oulu, Finland, in 1999, providing a forum for presenting recent research results and for discussing how to make progress in order to increase the usefulness of texture in practical applications. This book contains extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the workshop. The first part of the book deals with texture analysis methodology, while the second part covers various applications. The book gives a unique view of different approaches and applications of texture analysis. It should be of great interest both to researchers of machine vision and to practitioners in various application areas.

Agent engineering concerns the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science and engineering.This book addresses some of the key issues in agent engineering: What is meant by “autonomous agents”? How can we build agents with autonomy? What are the desirable capabilities of agents with respect to surviving (they will not die) and living (they will furthermore enjoy their being or existence)? How can agents cooperate among themselves? In order to achieve the optimal performance at the global level, how much optimization at the local, individual level and how much at the global level would be necessary?

This updated compendium provides a methodical introduction with a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges, and applications. More than a third of this edition comprised of new materials, highlighting descriptions of the classic methods, and extensions and novel approaches that have recently been introduced.Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, the settings in which each method is applicable and the consequences and tradeoffs incurred by using the method is succinctly featured. R code for implementation of the algorithm is also emphasized.The unique volume provides researchers, students and practitioners in industry with a comprehensive, concise and convenient resource on ensemble learning methods.

In recent years, libraries and archives all around the world have increased their efforts to digitize historical manuscripts. To integrate the manuscripts into digital libraries, pattern recognition and machine learning methods are needed to extract and index the contents of the scanned images.The unique compendium describes the outcome of the HisDoc research project, a pioneering attempt to study the whole processing chain of layout analysis, handwriting recognition, and retrieval of historical manuscripts. This description is complemented with an overview of other related research projects, in order to convey the current state of the art in the field and outline future trends.This must-have volume is a relevant reference work for librarians, archivists and computer scientists.

Keyword Spotting (KWS) has been proposed as a flexible and more error-tolerant alternative to full transcriptions. In most cases, it allows to retrieve arbitrary query words in handwritten historical document.This comprehensive compendium gives a self-contained preamble and visually attractive description to the field of graph-based KWS. The volume highlights a profound insight into each step of the whole KWS pipeline, viz. image preprocessing, graph representation and graph matching.Written by two world-renowned co-authors, this unique title combines two very current research fields of graph-based pattern recognition and document analysis. The book serves as an attractive teaching material for graduate students, as well as a useful reference text for professionals, academics and researchers.

This unique compendium represents important action of fuzzy systems to quantum mechanics. From fuzzy sets to fuzzy systems, it also gives clear descriptions on the development on fuzzy logic, where the most important result is the probability presentation of fuzzy systems.The important conclusions on fuzzy systems are used in the study of quantum mechanics, which is a very new idea. Eight important conclusions are obtained. The author has proved that mass-point motions in classical mechanics must have waves, which means that any mass-point motion in classical mechanics has wave mass-point dualism as well as any microscopic particle motion must have wave-particle dualism. Based on this conclusion, it has been proven that classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are unified.

This compendium provides a detailed account of the lognormality principle characterizing the human motor behavior by summarizing a sound theoretical framework for modeling such a behavior, introducing the most recent algorithms for extracting the lognormal components of complex movements in 2, 2.5 and 3 dimensions. It also vividly reports the most advanced applications to handwriting analysis and recognition, signature and writer verification, gesture recognition and calligraphy generation, evaluation of motor skills, improvement/degradation with aging, handwriting learning, education and developmental deficits, prescreening of children with ADHD (Attention Development and Hyperactivity Disorder), monitoring of concussion recovery, diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and aging effects in speech and handwriting.The volume provides a unique and useful source of references on the lognormality principle, an update on the most recent advances and an outlook at the most promising future developments in e-Security, e-Learning and e-Health.

This 3rd edition tackles the basic principle of deep learning as well as the application of combination of wavelet theory with deep learning to pattern recognition. Five new chapters related to the combination of wavelet theory and deep learning are added with many novel research results.The useful reference text will benefit academics, researchers, computer scientists, electronic engineers and graduate students in the field of pattern recognition, image analysis, machine learning and electrical and electronic engineering.

Tomorrow's robots, which includes the humanoid robot, can perform task like tutoring children, working as tour guides, driving humans to and from work, do the family shopping etc. Tomorrow's robots will enhance lives in ways we never dreamed possible. No time to attend the decisive meeting on Asian strategy? Let your robot go for you and make the decisions. Not feeling well enough to go to the clinic? Let Dr Robot come to you, make a diagnosis, and get you the necessary medicine for treatment. No time to coach the soccer team this week? Let the robot do it for you.Tomorrow's robots will be the most exciting and revolutionary things to happen to the world since the invention of the automobile. It will change the way we work, play, think, and live. Because of this, nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific research. These days, robotics is offered in almost every university in the world. Most mechanical engineering departments offer a similar course at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. And increasingly, many computer and electrical engineering departments are also offering it.This book will guide you, the curious beginner, from yesterday to tomorrow. The book will cover practical knowledge in understanding, developing, and using robots as versatile equipment to automate a variety of industrial processes or tasks. But, the book will also discuss the possibilities we can look forward to when we are capable of creating a vision-guided, learning machine.

An inadequate infrastructure for software testing is causing major losses to the world economy. The characteristics of software quality problems are quite similar to other tasks successfully tackled by artificial intelligence techniques. The aims of this book are to present state-of-the-art applications of artificial intelligence and data mining methods to quality assurance of complex software systems, and to encourage further research in this important and challenging area.

Data Mining is the science and technology of exploring data in order to discover previously unknown patterns. It is a part of the overall process of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). The accessibility and abundance of information today makes data mining a matter of considerable importance and necessity. This book provides an introduction to the field with an emphasis on advanced decomposition methods in general data mining tasks and for classification tasks in particular. The book presents a complete methodology for decomposing classification problems into smaller and more manageable sub-problems that are solvable by using existing tools. The various elements are then joined together to solve the initial problem.The benefits of decomposition methodology in data mining include: increased performance (classification accuracy); conceptual simplification of the problem; enhanced feasibility for huge databases; clearer and more comprehensible results; reduced runtime by solving smaller problems and by using parallel/distributed computation; and the opportunity of using different techniques for individual sub-problems.

This book addresses the range image registration problem for automatic 3D model construction. The focus is on obtaining highly precise alignments between different view pairs of the same object to avoid 3D model distortions; in contrast to most prior work, the view pairs may exhibit relatively little overlap and need not be prealigned. To this end, a novel effective evaluation metric for registration, the Surface Interpenetration Measure (SIM) is defined. This measure quantifies the interleaving of two surfaces as their alignment is refined, putting the qualitative evaluation of “splotchiness,” often used in reference to renderings of the aligned surfaces, onto a solid mathematical footing. The SIM is shown to be superior to mean squared error (i.e. more sensitive to fine scale changes) in controlling the final stages of the alignment process.The authors go on to combine the SIM with Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to develop a robust approach for range image registration. The results confirm that this technique achieves precise surface registration with no need for prealignment, as opposed to methods based on the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, the most popular to date. Thorough experimental results including an extensive comparative study are presented and enhanced GA-based approaches to improve the registration still further are proposed. The authors also develop a global multiview registration technique using the GA-based approach. The results show considerable promise in terms of accuracy for 3D modeling.

Software systems surround us. Software is a critical component in everything from the family car through electrical power systems to military equipment. As software plays an ever-increasing role in our lives and livelihoods, the quality of that software becomes more and more critical. However, our ability to deliver high-quality software has not kept up with those increasing demands. The economic fallout is enormous; the US economy alone is losing over US$50 billion per year due to software failures. This book presents new research into using advanced artificial intelligence techniques to guide software quality improvements. The techniques of chaos theory and data mining are brought to bear to provide new insights into the software development process. Written for researchers and practitioners in software engineering and computational intelligence, this book is a unique and important bridge between these two fields.

This book describes exciting new opportunities for utilizing robust graph representations of data with common machine learning algorithms. Graphs can model additional information which is often not present in commonly used data representations, such as vectors. Through the use of graph distance — a relatively new approach for determining graph similarity — the authors show how well-known algorithms, such as k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors classification, can be easily extended to work with graphs instead of vectors. This allows for the utilization of additional information found in graph representations, while at the same time employing well-known, proven algorithms.To demonstrate and investigate these novel techniques, the authors have selected the domain of web content mining, which involves the clustering and classification of web documents based on their textual substance. Several methods of representing web document content by graphs are introduced; an interesting feature of these representations is that they allow for a polynomial time distance computation, something which is typically an NP-complete problem when using graphs. Experimental results are reported for both clustering and classification in three web document collections using a variety of graph representations, distance measures, and algorithm parameters.In addition, this book describes several other related topics, many of which provide excellent starting points for researchers and students interested in exploring this new area of machine learning further. These topics include creating graph-based multiple classifier ensembles through random node selection and visualization of graph-based data using multidimensional scaling.

As became apparent after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, terrorist groups are increasingly using the Internet as a communication and propaganda tool where they can safely communicate with their affiliates, coordinate action plans, raise funds, and introduce new supporters to their networks. This is evident from the large number of web sites run by different terrorist organizations, though the URLs and geographical locations of these web sites are frequently moved around the globe. The wide use of the Internet by terrorists makes some people think that the risk of a major cyber-attack against the communication infrastructure is low. However, this situation may change abruptly once the terrorists decide that the Net does not serve their purposes anymore and, like any other invention of our civilization, deserves destruction.Fighting Terror in Cyberspace is a unique volume, which provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of terrorist threats in cyberspace along with state-of-the-art tools and technologies that can deal with these threats in the present and in the future. The book covers several key topics in cyber warfare such as terrorist use of the Internet, the Cyber Jihad, data mining tools and techniques of terrorist detection on the web, analysis and detection of terror financing, and automated identification of terrorist web sites in multiple languages. The contributors include leading researchers on international terrorism, as well as distinguished experts in information security and cyber intelligence. This book represents a valuable source of information for academic researchers, law enforcement and intelligence experts, and industry consultants who are involved in detection, analysis, and prevention of terrorist activities on the Internet.

This book provides a fundamentally new approach to pattern recognition in which objects are characterized by relations to other objects instead of by using features or models. This 'dissimilarity representation' bridges the gap between the traditionally opposing approaches of statistical and structural pattern recognition.Physical phenomena, objects and events in the world are related in various and often complex ways. Such relations are usually modeled in the form of graphs or diagrams. While this is useful for communication between experts, such representation is difficult to combine and integrate by machine learning procedures. However, if the relations are captured by sets of dissimilarities, general data analysis procedures may be applied for analysis.With their detailed description of an unprecedented approach absent from traditional textbooks, the authors have crafted an essential book for every researcher and systems designer studying or developing pattern recognition systems.

This is the first comprehensive book dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining and covers all aspects of this important technique.Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining, the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. The area is of great importance because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from the abundance of data available. Both theoreticians and practitioners are continually seeking techniques to make the process more efficient, cost-effective and accurate. Decision trees, originally implemented in decision theory and statistics, are highly effective tools in other areas such as data mining, text mining, information extraction, machine learning, and pattern recognition. This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer: Self-explanatory and easy to follow when compacted; Able to handle a variety of input data: nominal, numeric and textual; Able to process datasets that may have errors or missing values; High predictive performance for a relatively small computational effort; Available in many data mining packages over a variety of platforms; Useful for various tasks, such as classification, regression, clustering and feature selection;

This book is a collection of scientific papers published during the last five years, showing a broad spectrum of actual research topics and techniques used to solve challenging problems in the areas of computer vision and image analysis. The book will appeal to researchers, technicians and graduate students.

This book introduces SpecDB, an intelligent database created to represent and host software specifications in a machine-readable format, based on the principles of artificial intelligence and unit testing database operations. SpecDB is demonstrated via two automated intelligent tools. The first automatically generates database constraints from a rule-base in SpecDB. The second is a reverse engineering tool that logs the actual execution of the program from the code.

This compendium is a completely revised version of an earlier book, Data Mining in Time Series Databases, by the same editors. It provides a unique collection of new articles written by leading experts that account for the latest developments in the field of time series and data stream mining.The emerging topics covered by the book include weightless neural modeling for mining data streams, using ensemble classifiers for imbalanced and evolving data streams, document stream mining with active learning, and many more. In particular, it addresses the domain of streaming data, which has recently become one of the emerging topics in Data Science, Big Data, and related areas. Existing titles do not provide sufficient information on this topic.

The compendium presents the latest results of the most prominent competitions held in the field of Document Analysis and Text Recognition. It includes a description of the participating systems and the underlying methods on one hand and the datasets used together with evaluation metrics on the other hand. This volume also demonstrates with examples, how to organize a competition and how to make it successful. It will be an indispensable handbook to the document image analysis community.

A metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure designed to select a partial search algorithm that may lead to a good solution to an optimization problem, especially with incomplete or imperfect information.This unique compendium focuses on the insights of hybrid metaheuristics. It illustrates the recent researches on evolving novel hybrid metaheuristic algorithms, and prominently highlights its diverse application areas. As such, the book helps readers to grasp the essentials of hybrid metaheuristics and to address real world problems.The must-have volume serves as an inspiring read for professionals, researchers, academics and graduate students in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning.Related Link(s);

Researchers from various disciplines such as pattern recognition, statistics, and machine learning have explored the use of ensemble methodology since the late seventies. Thus, they are faced with a wide variety of methods, given the growing interest in the field. This book aims to impose a degree of order upon this diversity by presenting a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges and applications.The book describes in detail the classical methods, as well as the extensions and novel approaches developed recently. Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, it also explains the circumstances in which this method is applicable and the consequences and the trade-offs incurred by using the method.

The 2nd edition is an update of the book Wavelet Theory and its Application to Pattern Recognition published in 2000. Three new chapters, which are research results conducted during 2001-2008, are added. The book consists of three parts — the first presents a brief survey of the status of pattern recognition with wavelet theory; the second contains the basic theory of wavelet analysis; the third includes applications of wavelet theory to pattern recognition. The new book provides a bibliography of 170 references including the current state-of-the-art theory and applications of wavelet analysis to pattern recognition.