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.

Images are all around us! The proliferation of low-cost, high-quality imaging devices has led to an explosion in acquired images. When these images are acquired from a microscope, telescope, satellite, or medical imaging device, there is a statistical image processing task: the inference of something—an artery, a road, a DNA marker, an oil spill—from imagery, possibly noisy, blurry, or incomplete. A great many textbooks have been written on image processing. However this book does not so much focus on images, per se, but rather on spatial data sets, with one or more measurements taken over a two or higher dimensional space, and to which standard image-processing algorithms may not apply. There are many important data analysis methods developed in this text for such statistical image problems. Examples abound throughout remote sensing (satellite data mapping, data assimilation, climate-change studies, land use), medical imaging (organ segmentation, anomaly detection), computer vision (image classification, segmentation), and other 2D/3D problems (biological imaging, porous media). The goal, then, of this text is to address methods for solving multidimensional statistical problems. The text strikes a balance between mathematics and theory on the one hand, versus applications and algorithms on the other, by deliberately developing the basic theory (Part I), the mathematical modeling (Part II), and the algorithmic and numerical methods (Part III) of solving a given problem. The particular emphases of the book include inverse problems, multidimensional modeling, random fields, and hierarchical methods.

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.

55% new material in the latest edition of this "must-have for students and practitioners of image & video processing!This Handbook is intended to serve as the basic reference point on image and video processing, in the field, in the research laboratory, and in the classroom. Each chapter has been written by carefully selected, distinguished experts specializing in that topic and carefully reviewed by the Editor, Al Bovik, ensuring that the greatest depth of understanding be communicated to the reader. Coverage includes introductory, intermediate and advanced topics and as such, this book serves equally well as classroom textbook as reference resource. • Provides practicing engineers and students with a highly accessible resource for learning and using image/video processing theory and algorithms • Includes a new chapter on image processing education, which should prove invaluable for those developing or modifying their curricula • Covers the various image and video processing standards that exist and are emerging, driving today's explosive industry • Offers an understanding of what images are, how they are modeled, and gives an introduction to how they are perceived • Introduces the necessary, practical background to allow engineering students to acquire and process their own digital image or video data • Culminates with a diverse set of applications chapters, covered in sufficient depth to serve as extensible models to the reader's own potential applications About the Editor... Al Bovik is the Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). He has published over 400 technical articles in the general area of image and video processing and holds two U.S. patents. Dr. Bovik was Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2000), received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award (1998), the IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000), and twice was a two-time Honorable Mention winner of the international Pattern Recognition Society Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was Editor-in-Chief, of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1996-2002), has served on and continues to serve on many other professional boards and panels, and was the Founding General Chairman of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing which was held in Austin, Texas in 1994.* No other resource for image and video processing contains the same breadth of up-to-date coverage* Each chapter written by one or several of the top experts working in that area* Includes all essential mathematics, techniques, and algorithms for every type of image and video processing used by electrical engineers, computer scientists, internet developers, bioengineers, and scientists in various, image-intensive disciplines

This book develops the mathematical foundation of modern image processing and low-level computer vision, bridging contemporary mathematics with state-of-the-art methodologies in modern image processing, whilst organizing contemporary literature into a coherent and logical structure. The authors have integrated the diversity of modern image processing approaches by revealing the few common threads that connect them to Fourier and spectral analysis, the machinery that image processing has been traditionally built on. The text is systematic and well organized: the geometric, functional, and atomic structures of images are investigated, before moving to a rigorous development and analysis of several image processors. The book is comprehensive and integrative, covering the four most powerful classes of mathematical tools in contemporary image analysis and processing while exploring their intrinsic connections and integration. The material is balanced in theory and computation, following a solid theoretical analysis of model building and performance with computational implementation and numerical examples.

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.

Due to the scale and complexity of data sets currently being collected in areas such as health, transportation, environmental science, engineering, information technology, business and finance, modern quantitative analysts are seeking improved and appropriate computational and statistical methods to explore, model and draw inferences from big data. This book aims to introduce suitable approaches for such endeavours, providing applications and case studies for the purpose of demonstration. Computational and Statistical Methods for Analysing Big Data with Applications starts with an overview of the era of big data. It then goes onto explain the computational and statistical methods which have been commonly applied in the big data revolution. For each of these methods, an example is provided as a guide to its application. Five case studies are presented next, focusing on computer vision with massive training data, spatial data analysis, advanced experimental design methods for big data, big data in clinical medicine, and analysing data collected from mobile devices, respectively. The book concludes with some final thoughts and suggested areas for future research in big data. - Advanced computational and statistical methodologies for analysing big data are developed - Experimental design methodologies are described and implemented to make the analysis of big data more computationally tractable - Case studies are discussed to demonstrate the implementation of the developed methods - Five high-impact areas of application are studied: computer vision, geosciences, commerce, healthcare and transportation - Computing code/programs are provided where appropriate