Biological visual systems employ massively parallel processing to perform real-world visual tasks in real time. A key to this remarkable performance seems to be that biological systems construct representations of their visual image data at multiple scales. A Pyramid Framework for Early Vision describes a multiscale, or `pyramid', approach to vision, including its theoretical foundations, a set of pyramid-based modules for image processing, object detection, texture discrimination, contour detection and processing, feature detection and description, and motion detection and tracking. It also shows how these modules can be implemented very efficiently on hypercube-connected processor networks. A Pyramid Framework for Early Vision is intended for both students of vision and vision system designers; it provides a general approach to vision systems design as well as a set of robust, efficient vision modules.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2006, held in Cancun, Mexico in November 2006. The 99 revised full papers presented together with three keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 239 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research and mathematical methods.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2009, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in November 2009. The 64 revised full papers presented together with 44 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 187 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image coding, processing and analysis; segmentation, analysis of shape and texture; geometric image processing and analysis; analysis of signal, speech and language; document processing and recognition; feature extraction, clustering and classification; statistical pattern recognition; neural networks for pattern recognition; computer vision; video segmentation and tracking; robot vision; intelligent remote sensing, imagery research and discovery techniques; intelligent computing for remote sensing imagery; as well as intelligent fusion and classification techniques.

This book presents novel graph-theoretic methods for complex computer vision and pattern recognition tasks. It presents the application of graph theory to low-level processing of digital images, presents graph-theoretic learning algorithms for high-level computer vision and pattern recognition applications, and provides detailed descriptions of several applications of graph-based methods to real-world pattern recognition tasks.

Scale is a concept the antiquity of which can hardly be traced. Certainly the familiar phenomena that accompany sc ale changes in optical patterns are mentioned in the earliest written records. The most obvious topological changes such as the creation or annihilation of details have been a topic to philosophers, artists and later scientists. This appears to of fascination be the case for all cultures from which extensive written records exist. For th instance, chinese 17 c artist manuals remark that "distant faces have no eyes" . The merging of details is also obvious to many authors, e. g. , Lucretius mentions the fact that distant islands look like a single one. The one topo logical event that is (to the best of my knowledge) mentioned only late (by th John Ruskin in his "Elements of drawing" of the mid 19 c) is the splitting of a blob on blurring. The change of images on a gradual increase of resolu tion has been a recurring theme in the arts (e. g. , the poetic description of the distant armada in Calderon's The Constant Prince) and this "mystery" (as Ruskin calls it) is constantly exploited by painters.

Proceedings of the Fifth International School on Neural Networks "E.R. Caianiello" on Visual Attention MechaProceedings of the Fifth International School on Neural Networks "E.R. Caianiello" on Visual Attention Mechanisms, held 23-28 October 2000 in Vietri sul Mare, Italy.nisms, held 23-28 October 2000 in Vietri sul Mare, Italy. The book covers a number of broad themes relevant to visual attention, ranging from computer vision to psychology and physiology of vision. The main theme of the book is the attention processes of vision systems and it aims to point out the analogies and the divergences of biological vision with the frameworks introduced by computer scientists in artificial vision.

Computer vision solutions used to be very specific and difficult to adapt to different or even unforeseen situations. The current development is calling for simple to use yet robust applications that could be employed in various situations. This trend requires the reassessment of some theoretical issues in computer vision. A better general understanding of vision processes, new insights and better theories are needed. The papers selected from the conference staged in Dagstuhl in 1996 to gather scientists from the West and the former eastern-block countries address these goals and cover such fields as 2D images (scale space, morphology, segmentation, neural networks, Hough transform, texture, pyramids), recovery of 3-D structure (shape from shading, optical flow, 3-D object recognition) and how vision is integrated into a larger task-driven framework (hand-eye calibration, navigation, perception-action cycle).