This review volume provides from both theoretical and application points of views, recent developments and state-of-the-art reviews in various areas of pattern recognition, image processing, machine learning, soft computing, data mining and web intelligence.Machine Interpretation of Patterns: Image Analysis and Data Mining is an essential and invaluable resource for professionals and advanced graduates in computer science, mathematics and life sciences. It can also be considered as an integrated volume to researchers interested in doing interdisciplinary research where computer science is a component.

This unique and useful textbook presents a comprehensive review of the essentials of image data mining, and the latest cutting-edge techniques used in the field. The coverage spans all aspects of image analysis and understanding, offering deep insights into areas of feature extraction, machine learning, and image retrieval. The theoretical coverage is supported by practical mathematical models and algorithms, utilizing data from real-world examples and experiments. Topics and features: Describes essential tools for image mining, covering Fourier transforms, Gabor filters, and contemporary wavelet transforms Develops many new exercises (most with MATLAB code and instructions) Includes review summaries at the end of each chapter Analyses state-of-the-art models, algorithms, and procedures for image mining Integrates new sections on pre-processing, discrete cosine transform, and statistical inference and testing Demonstrates how features like color, texture, and shape can be mined or extracted for image representation Applies powerful classification approaches: Bayesian classification, support vector machines, neural networks, and decision trees Implements imaging techniques for indexing, ranking, and presentation, as well as database visualization This easy-to-follow, award-winning book illuminates how concepts from fundamental and advanced mathematics can be applied to solve a broad range of image data mining problems encountered by students and researchers of computer science. Students of mathematics and other scientific disciplines will also benefit from the applications and solutions described in the text, together with the hands-on exercises that enable the reader to gain first-hand experience of computing.

The field of machine learning and data mining in connection with pattern recognition enjoys growing popularity and attracts many researchers. Automatic pattern recognition systems have proven successful in many applications. The wide use of these systems depends on their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to deal with new objects. This requires learning capabilities on the parts of these systems. The exceptional attraction of learning in pattern recognition lies in the specific data themselves and the different stages at which they get processed in a pattern recognition system. This results a specific branch within the field of machine learning. At the workshop, were presented machine learning approaches for image pre-processing, image segmentation, recognition and interpretation. Machine learning systems were shown on applications such as document analysis and medical image analysis. Many databases are developed that contain multimedia sources such as images, measurement protocols, and text documents. Such systems should be able to retrieve these sources by content. That requires specific retrieval and indexing strategies for images and signals. Higher quality database contents can be achieved if it were possible to mine these databases for their underlying information. Such mining techniques have to consider the specific characteristic of the image sources. The field of mining multimedia databases is just starting out. We hope that our workshop can attract many other researchers to this subject.

The field of machine learning and data mining in connection with pattern recognition enjoys growing popularity and attracts many researchers. Automatic pattern recognition systems have proven successful in many applications. The wide use of these systems depends on their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to deal with new objects. This requires learning capabilities on the parts of these systems. The exceptional attraction of learning in pattern recognition lies in the specific data themselves and the different stages at which they get processed in a pattern recognition system. This results a specific branch within the field of machine learning. At the workshop, were presented machine learning approaches for image pre-processing, image segmentation, recognition and interpretation. Machine learning systems were shown on applications such as document analysis and medical image analysis. Many databases are developed that contain multimedia sources such as images, measurement protocols, and text documents. Such systems should be able to retrieve these sources by content. That requires specific retrieval and indexing strategies for images and signals. Higher quality database contents can be achieved if it were possible to mine these databases for their underlying information. Such mining techniques have to consider the specific characteristic of the image sources. The field of mining multimedia databases is just starting out. We hope that our workshop can attract many other researchers to this subject.

The field of machine learning and data mining in connection with pattern recognition enjoys growing popularity and attracts many researchers. Automatic pattern recognition systems have proven successful in many applications. The wide use of these systems depends on their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to deal with new objects. This requires learning capabilities on the parts of these systems. The exceptional attraction of learning in pattern recognition lies in the specific data themselves and the different stages at which they get processed in a pattern recognition system. This results a specific branch within the field of machine learning. At the workshop, were presented machine learning approaches for image pre-processing, image segmentation, recognition and interpretation. Machine learning systems were shown on applications such as document analysis and medical image analysis. Many databases are developed that contain multimedia sources such as images, measurement protocols, and text documents. Such systems should be able to retrieve these sources by content. That requires specific retrieval and indexing strategies for images and signals. Higher quality database contents can be achieved if it were possible to mine these databases for their underlying information. Such mining techniques have to consider the specific characteristic of the image sources. The field of mining multimedia databases is just starting out. We hope that our workshop can attract many other researchers to this subject.

Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision represent an exciting part of modern cognitive and computer science. Following an explosion of inter est during the Seventies, the Eighties were characterized by the maturing of the field and the significant growth of active applications; Remote Sensing, Technical Diagnostics, Autonomous Vehicle Guidance and Medical Imaging are the most rapidly developing areas. This progress can be seen in an in creasing number of software and hardware products on the market as well as in a number of digital image processing and machine vision courses offered at universities world-wide. There are many texts available in the areas we cover - most (indeed, all of which we know) are referenced somewhere in this book. The subject suffers, however, from a shortage of texts at the 'elementary' level - that appropriate for undergraduates beginning or completing their studies of the topic, or for Master's students - and the very rapid developments that have taken and are still taking place, which quickly age some of the very good text books produced over the last decade or so. This book reflects the authors' experience in teaching one and two semester undergraduate and graduate courses in Digital Image Processing, Digital Image Analysis, Machine Vision, Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Robotics at their respective institutions.

The two volume set LNCS 3686 and LNCS 3687 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Pattern Recognition, ICAPR 2005, held in Bath, UK in August 2005. The papers submitted to ICAPR 2005 were thoroughly reviewed by up to three referees per paper and less than 40% of the submitted papers were accepted. The first volume includes 73 contributions related to Pattern Recognition and Data Mining (which included papers from the tracks of pattern recognition methods, knowledge and learning, and data mining); topics addressed are pattern recognition, data mining, signal processing and OCR/ document analysis. The second volume contains 87 contributions related to Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (which included papers from the applications track) and deals with security and surveillance, biometrics, image processing and medical imaging. It also contains papers from the Workshop on Pattern Recognition for Crime Prevention.