Computer vision systems attempt to understand a scene and its components from mostly visual information. The geometry exhibited by the real world, the influence of material properties on scattering of incident light, and the process of imaging introduce constraints and properties that are key to solving some of these tasks. In the presence of noisy observations and other uncertainties, the algorithms make use of statistical methods for robust inference. In this paper, we highlight the role of geometric constraints in statistical estimation methods, and how the interplay of geometry and statistics leads to the choice and design of algorithms. In particular, we illustrate the role of imaging, illumination, and motion constraints in classical vision problems such as tracking, structure from motion, metrology, activity analysis and recognition, and appropriate statistical methods used in each of these problems.

Why are We Writing This Book? Visual data (graphical, image, video, and visualized data) affect every aspect of modern society. The cheap collection, storage, and transmission of vast amounts of visual data have revolutionized the practice of science, technology, and business. Innovations from various disciplines have been developed and applied to the task of designing intelligent machines that can automatically detect and exploit useful regularities (patterns) in visual data. One such approach to machine intelligence is statistical learning and pattern analysis for visual data. Over the past two decades, rapid advances have been made throughout the ?eld of visual pattern analysis. Some fundamental problems, including perceptual gro- ing,imagesegmentation, stereomatching, objectdetectionandrecognition,and- tion analysis and visual tracking, have become hot research topics and test beds in multiple areas of specialization, including mathematics, neuron-biometry, and c- nition. A great diversity of models and algorithms stemming from these disciplines has been proposed. To address the issues of ill-posed problems and uncertainties in visual pattern modeling and computing, researchers have developed rich toolkits based on pattern analysis theory, harmonic analysis and partial differential eq- tions, geometry and group theory, graph matching, and graph grammars. Among these technologies involved in intelligent visual information processing, statistical learning and pattern analysis is undoubtedly the most popular and imp- tant approach, and it is also one of the most rapidly developing ?elds, with many achievements in recent years. Above all, it provides a unifying theoretical fra- work for intelligent visual information processing applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, ICIAR 2007, held in Montreal, Canada, in August 2007. The 71 revised full papers and 44 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image restoration and enhancement, image and video processing and analysis, image segmentation, computer vision, pattern recognition for image analysis, shape and matching, motion analysis, tracking, image retrieval and indexing, image and video coding and encryption, biometrics, biomedical image analysis, and applications.

The 2nd International Workshop on Statistical Methods in Video Processing, SMVP 2004, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, as an associated workshop of ECCV 2004, the 8th European Conference on Computer Vision. A total of 30 papers were submitted to the workshop. Of these, 17 papers were accepted for presentation and included in these proceedings, following a double-blind review process. The workshop had 42 registered participants. The focus of the meeting was on recent progress in the application of - vanced statistical methods to solve computer vision tasks. The one-day scienti?c program covered areas of high interest in vision research, such as dense rec- struction of 3D scenes, multibody motion segmentation, 3D shape inference, errors-in-variables estimation, probabilistic tracking, information fusion, optical ?owcomputation,learningfornonstationaryvideodata,noveltydetectionin- namic backgrounds, background modeling, grouping using feature uncertainty, and crowd segmentation from video. We wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers for their interest in the workshop.Wealsowishtothankthemembersofourprogramcommitteeandthe external reviewers for their commitment of time and e?ort in providing valuable recommendations for each submission. We are thankful to Vaclav Hlavac, the General Chair of ECCV 2004, and to Radim Sara, for the local organization of the workshop and registration management. We hope you will ?nd these proceedings both inspiring and of high scienti?c quality.

The four-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 5302/5303/5304/5305 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2008, held in Marseille, France, in October 2008. The 243 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 871 papers submitted. The four books cover the entire range of current issues in computer vision. The papers are organized in topical sections on recognition, stereo, people and face recognition, object tracking, matching, learning and features, MRFs, segmentation, computational photography and active reconstruction.

This title is part of a two volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2007. Coverage includes shape and texture, image and video processing, face and gesture, tracking, camera networks, learning, motion and tracking, retrieval and search, human pose estimation, matching, face/gesture/action detection and recognition, low level vision and phtometory, motion and tracking, human detection, and segmentation.