During the last 30 years, face recognition and related problems such as face detection/tracking and facial expression recognition have attracted researchers from both the engineering and psychology communities. In addition, extensive research has been carried out to study hand and body gestures. The understanding of how humans perceive these important cues has significant scientific value and extensive applications. For example, human-computer interaction, visual surveillance, and smart video indexing are active application areas. Aiming towards putting such amazing perception capability onto computer systems, researchers have made substantial progress. However, technological challenges still exist in many aspects. Following a format similar to the IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG) 2003, this one-day workshop (AMFG 2005) provided a focused international forum to bring together well-known researchers and research groups to review the status of recognition, analysis and modeling of faces and gestures, to discuss the challenges that we are facing, and to explore future directions. Overall, 30 papers were selected from 90 submitted manuscripts. The topics of these papers range from feature representation, robust recognition, learning, and 3D modeling to psychology. In addition, two invited talks were given, by Prof. Kanade and Dr. Phillips. The technical program was organized into four oral sessions and two poster sessions. This workshop would not have been possible without the timely reviews provided by the members of the Technical Program Committee under a tight schedule. October 2005 Wenyi Zhao Shaogang Gong Xiaoou Tang

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Analysis and Modelling of Faces and Gestures, AMFG 2007, held within the scope of ICCV 2007, the International Conference on Computer Vision. The papers review the status of recognition, analysis and modeling of face, gesture, activity, and behavior. Topics addressed include feature representation, 3D face, video-based face recognition, facial motion analysis, and sign recognition.

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyzing image sequences, or video understanding. Video understanding deals with understanding of video sequences, e. g. , recognition of gestures, activities, facial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvious overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to gener ate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Researchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to gen erate the synthetic imagery. A good example of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is de rived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analysis followed by synthesis.

This book describes in a detailed fashion the application of hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques for intelligent control and mobile robotics. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The prudent combination of SC techniques can produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems that are capable of solving real-world problems. This is illustrated in this book with a wide range of applications, with particular emphasis in intelligent control and mobile robotics. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of theory and algorithms, which are basically papers that propose new models and concepts, which can be the basis for achieving intelligent control and mobile robotics. The second part contains papers with the main theme of intelligent control, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques, like evolutionary algorithms and neural networks, for achieving intelligent control of non-linear plants. The third part contains papers with the theme of optimization of fuzzy controllers, which basically consider the application of bio-inspired optimization methods to automate the de-sign process of optimal type-1 and type-2 fuzzy controllers. The fourth part contains papers that deal with the application of SC techniques in times series prediction and intelligent agents. The fifth part contains papers with the theme of computer vision and robotics, which are papers considering soft computing methods for applications related to vision and robotics.

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating one. Given this, it seems only sensible to explore affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. This is the research field for which, over ten years ago, Rosalind Picard coined the phrase "affective computing". The present book provides an account of the latest work on a variety of aspects related to affect and emotion in human-technology interaction. It covers theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects as well as sensing issues, and reports on a number of affective applications that have been developed in recent years.

Major strides have been made in face processing in the last ten years due to the fast growing need for security in various locations around the globe. A human eye can discern the details of a specific face with relative ease. It is this level of detail that researchers are striving to create with ever evolving computer technologies that will become our perfect mechanical eyes. The difficulty that confronts researchers stems from turning a 3D object into a 2D image. That subject is covered in depth from several different perspectives in this volume. Face Processing: Advanced Modeling and Methods begins with a comprehensive introductory chapter for those who are new to the field. A compendium of articles follows that is divided into three sections. The first covers basic aspects of face processing from human to computer. The second deals with face modeling from computational and physiological points of view. The third tackles the advanced methods, which include illumination, pose, expression, and more. Editors Zhao and Chellappa have compiled a concise and necessary text for industrial research scientists, students, and professionals working in the area of image and signal processing. - Contributions from over 35 leading experts in face detection, recognition and image processing - Over 150 informative images with 16 images in FULL COLOR illustrate and offer insight into the most up-to-date advanced face processing methods and techniques - Extensive detail makes this a need-to-own book for all involved with image and signal processing