This unique book discusses machine understanding (MU). This new branch of classic machine perception research focuses on perception that leads to understanding and is based on the categories of sensory objects. In this approach the visual and non-visual knowledge, in the form of visual and non-visual concepts, is used in the complex reasoning process that leads to understanding. The book presents selected new concepts, such as perceptual transformations, within the machine understanding framework, and uses perceptual transformations to solve perceptual problems (visual intelligence tests) during understanding, where understanding is regarded as an ability to solve complex visual problems described in the authors’ previous books. Thanks to the uniqueness of the research topics covered, the book appeals to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, especially computer science, cognitive science and philosophy.

The following are the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Human and Machine Perception held in Palermo, Italy, on June 20 -23, 2000, under the auspices of three Institutions: the Cybernetic and Biophysics Group (GNCB) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the two Inter-Department Centers of Cognitive Sciences of Palermo and Pavia University respectively. A broad spectrum of topics are covered in this series, ranging from computer perception to psychology and physiology of perception. The theme of this workshop on Human and Machine Perception was focused on Thinking, Deciding, and Acting. As in the past editions the final goal has been the analysis and the comparison of biological and artificial solutions. The focus of the lectures has been on presenting the state-of-the-art and outlining open questions. In particular, they sought to stress links, suggesting possible synergies between the different cultural areas. The panel discussion has been conceived as a forum for an open debate, briefly introduced by each panelist, and mainly aimed at deeper investigation of the different approaches to perception and strictly related topics. The panelists were asked to prepare a few statements on hot-points as a guide for discussion. These statements were delivered to the participants together with the final program, for a more qualified discussion.

With the advance of speech, image and video technology, human-computer interaction (HCI) will reach a new phase.In recent years, HCI has been extended to human-machine communication (HMC) and the perceptual user interface (PUI). The final goal in HMC is that the communication between humans and machines is similar to human-to-human communication. Moreover, the machine can support human-to-human communication (e.g. an interface for the disabled). For this reason, various aspects of human communication are to be considered in HMC. The HMC interface, called a multimodal interface, includes different types of input methods, such as natural language, gestures, face and handwriting characters.The nine papers in this book have been selected from the 92 high-quality papers constituting the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Multimodal Interface (ICMI '99), which was held in Hong Kong in 1999. The papers cover a wide spectrum of the multimodal interface.

This book describes how human hearing works and how to build machines that analyze sounds in the same way that people do.

Human and Machine Vision provides information pertinent to an interdisciplinary program of research in visual perception. This book presents a psychophysical study of the human visual system, which provides insights on how to model the flexibility required by a general-purpose visual system. Organized into 17 chapters, this book begins with an overview of how a visual display is segmented into components on the basis of textual differences. This text then proposes three criteria for judging representations of shape. Other chapters consider an increased use of machine vision programs as models of human vision and of data from human vision in developing programs for machine vision. This book discusses as well the diversity and flexibility of systems for representing visual information. The final chapter deals with dot patterns and discusses the process of interring orientation information from collections of them. This book is a valuable resource for psychologists, neurophysiologists, and computer scientists.