Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a vital part in the continued development of computer science and informatics. The AI applications employed in fields such as medicine, economics, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and logical analysis, not forgetting industry, are now indispensable for the effective functioning of a multitude of systems. This book presents the papers from the 20th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2012, held in Montpellier, France, in August 2012. The ECAI conference remains Europe's principal opportunity for researchers and practitioners of Artificial Intelligence to gather and to discuss the latest trends and challenges in all subfields of AI, as well as to demonstrate innovative applications and uses of advanced AI technology. ECAI 2012 featured four keynote speakers, an extensive workshop program, seven invited tutorials and the new Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence track, in which six invited speakers delivered perspective talks on particularly interesting new research results, directions and trends in Artificial Intelligence or in one of its related fields. The proceedings of PAIS 2012 and the System Demonstrations Track are also included in this volume, which will be of interest to all those wishing to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field of AI.

Natural Object Recognition presents a totally new approach to the automation of scene understanding. Rather than attempting to construct highly specialized algorithms for recognizing physical objects, as is customary in modern computer vision research, the application and subsequent evaluation of large numbers of relatively straightforward image processing routines is used to recognize natural features such as trees, bushes, and rocks. The use of contextual information is the key to simplifying the problem to the extent that well understood algorithms give reliable results in ground-level, outdoor scenes.

This monograph provides a detailed record of the ?GRUFF? research project. The goal of the GRUFF project is to develop techniques for robotic vision systems to recognize objects by reasoning about their intended function rather than matching to a pre-defined database of 2-D object appearances or 3-D object shapes. The contributions of this work are: a demonstration of the feasibility of the ?form and function? approach to reasoning about 3-D shapes; a demonstration of the concept of using a small number of knowledge primitives as component building blocks in creating a function-based definition of an object category; and an indexing mechanism to make processing for recognition more efficient without any substantial decrease in correctness of classification. Results are given for the analysis of over 500 3-D shape descriptions created with a solid modeling tool and over 200 shape descriptions extracted from real laser range finder images.

As a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, deep learning has achieved very impressive success in solving grand challenges in many fields including speech recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, image and video processing, and multimedia. This article provides a historical overview of deep learning and focus on its applications in object recognition, detection, and segmentation, which are key challenges of computer vision and have numerous applications to images and videos. The discussed research topics on object recognition include image classification on ImageNet, face recognition, and video classification. The detection part covers general object detection on ImageNet, pedestrian detection, face landmark detection (face alignment), and human landmark detection (pose estimation). On the segmentation side, the article discusses the most recent progress on scene labeling, semantic segmentation, face parsing, human parsing and saliency detection. Object recognition is considered as whole-image classification, while detection and segmentation are pixelwise classification tasks. Their fundamental differences will be discussed in this article. Fully convolutional neural networks and highly efficient forward and backward propagation algorithms specially designed for pixelwise classification task will be introduced. The covered application domains are also much diversified. Human and face images have regular structures, while general object and scene images have much more complex variations in geometric structures and layout. Videos include the temporal dimension. Therefore, they need to be processed with different deep models. All the selected domain applications have received tremendous attentions in the computer vision and multimedia communities. Through concrete examples of these applications, we explain the key points which make deep learning outperform conventional computer vision systems. (1) Different than traditional pattern recognition systems, which heavily rely on manually designed features, deep learning automatically learns hierarchical feature representations from massive training data and disentangles hidden factors of input data through multi-level nonlinear mappings. (2) Different than existing pattern recognition systems which sequentially design or train their key components, deep learning is able to jointly optimize all the components and crate synergy through close interactions among them. (3) While most machine learning models can be approximated with neural networks with shallow structures, for some tasks, the expressive power of deep models increases exponentially as their architectures go deep. Deep models are especially good at learning global contextual feature representation with their deep structures. (4) Benefitting from the large learning capacity of deep models, some classical computer vision challenges can be recast as high-dimensional data transform problems and can be solved from new perspectives. Finally, some open questions and future works regarding to deep learning in object recognition, detection, and segmentation will be discussed.

Object Detection with Deep Learning Models discusses recent advances in object detection and recognition using deep learning methods, which have achieved great success in the field of computer vision and image processing. It provides a systematic and methodical overview of the latest developments in deep learning theory and its applications to computer vision, illustrating them using key topics, including object detection, face analysis, 3D object recognition, and image retrieval. The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in deep learning, computer vision and beyond and can also be used as a reference book. The comprehensive comparison of various deep-learning applications helps readers with a basic understanding of machine learning and calculus grasp the theories and inspires applications in other computer vision tasks. Features: A structured overview of deep learning in object detection A diversified collection of applications of object detection using deep neural networks Emphasize agriculture and remote sensing domains Exclusive discussion on moving object detection

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2018, held in Qingdao, China, in November 2018.The 60 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The theme of the 2018 conference is: Social Robotics and AI. In addition to the technical sessions, ICSR 2018 included 2 workshops:Smart Sensing Systems: Towards Safe Navigation and Social Human-Robot Interaction of Service Robots.