Hidden Markov models (HMMs) originally emerged in the domain of speech recognition. In recent years, they have attracted growing interest in the area of computer vision as well. This book is a collection of articles on new developments in the theory of HMMs and their application in computer vision. It addresses topics such as handwriting recognition, shape recognition, face and gesture recognition, tracking, and image database retrieval.This book is also published as a special issue of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (February 2001).

This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition now includes a more detailed treatment of the EM algorithm, a description of an efficient approximate Viterbi-training procedure, a theoretical derivation of the perplexity measure and coverage of multi-pass decoding based on n-best search. Supporting the discussion of the theoretical foundations of Markov modeling, special emphasis is also placed on practical algorithmic solutions. Features: introduces the formal framework for Markov models; covers the robust handling of probability quantities; presents methods for the configuration of hidden Markov models for specific application areas; describes important methods for efficient processing of Markov models, and the adaptation of the models to different tasks; examines algorithms for searching within the complex solution spaces that result from the joint application of Markov chain and hidden Markov models; reviews key applications of Markov models.

The two-volume set LNAI 7894 and LNCS 7895 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2013, held in Zakopane, Poland in June 2013. The 112 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 274 submissions. The 57 papers included in the first volume are organized in the following topical sections: neural networks and their applications; fuzzy systems and their applications; pattern classification; and computer vision, image and speech analysis.

Stochastic Image Processing provides the first thorough treatment of Markov and hidden Markov random fields and their application to image processing. Although promoted as a promising approach for over thirty years, it has only been in the past few years that the theory and algorithms have developed to the point of providing useful solutions to old and new problems in image processing. Markov random fields are a multidimensional extension of Markov chains, but the generalization is complicated by the lack of a natural ordering of pixels in multidimensional spaces. Hidden Markov fields are a natural generalization of the hidden Markov models that have proved essential to the development of modern speech recognition, but again the multidimensional nature of the signals makes them inherently more complicated to handle. This added complexity contributed to the long time required for the development of successful methods and applications. This book collects together a variety of successful approaches to a complete and useful characterization of multidimensional Markov and hidden Markov models along with applications to image analysis. The book provides a survey and comparative development of an exciting and rapidly evolving field of multidimensional Markov and hidden Markov random fields with extensive references to the literature.

This book focuses on recent advances, approaches, theories, and applications related Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). In particular, the book presents recent inference frameworks and applications that consider HMMs. The authors discuss challenging problems that exist when considering HMMs for a specific task or application, such as estimation or selection, etc. The goal of this volume is to summarize the recent advances and modern approaches related to these problems. The book also reports advances on classic but difficult problems in HMMs such as inference and feature selection and describes real-world applications of HMMs from several domains. The book pertains to researchers and graduate students, who will gain a clear view of recent developments related to HMMs and their applications.

The goal of this book is to address the use of several important machine learning techniques into computer vision applications. An innovative combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques has the promise of advancing the field of computer vision, which contributes to better understanding of complex real-world applications. The effective usage of machine learning technology in real-world computer vision problems requires understanding the domain of application, abstraction of a learning problem from a given computer vision task, and the selection of appropriate representations for the learnable (input) and learned (internal) entities of the system. In this book, we address all these important aspects from a new perspective: that the key element in the current computer revolution is the use of machine learning to capture the variations in visual appearance, rather than having the designer of the model accomplish this. As a bonus, models learned from large datasets are likely to be more robust and more realistic than the brittle all-design models.