This volume contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Image Sequence Processing and Dynamic Scene Analysis" held 21 June - 2 July, 1982 in Hotel Maritim, Braunlage/Harz, Federal Republic of Germany. The organizing eommittee of the institute consists of T.S. Huang (Director), H.G. Musmann (Co Director), H.H. Nagel (Consultant), and C.E. Liedtke and W. Geuen (Local 'arrangement). This Institute was devoted to the rapidly emerging field of image sequence processing and dynamic scene analysis which has man! important applications in cluding target tracking, television bandwidth compression, highway traffic moni toring, and analysis of heart wall motion for medical diagnosis. The lectures and discussions in this Institute fell into three overlapping categories: Motion estimation; pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques in dynamic scene analysis; and, applications. 1) Motion estimation - One of the most important problems in image sequence analysis and dynamic scene analysis is displacement and motion estimation. For example, in interframe coding using temporal DPCM, displacement estimation and compensation can improve efficiency significantly. Also, estimated motion parameters can be powerful cues in target segmentation, detection, and classification. In this Institute, a number of recently developed techniques for displacement and motion estimation were discussed.

This book is the outcome of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Machine Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering for Robotic Applications held at Maratea, Italy in May 1986. Attendance of the workshop was by invitation only. Most of the participants and speakers are recognized leaders in the field, representing industry, government and academic c0mrnunity worldwide. The focus of the workshop was to review the recent advances of machine intelligence and knowledge engineering for robotic appli cations. It covers five main areas of interest. They are grouped into five sections: 1. Robot Vision 2. Knowledge Representation and Image Understanding 3. Robot Control and Inference Systems 4. Task Planning and Expert Systems 5. Software/Hardware Systems Also included in this book are a paper from the Poster Session and a brief report of the panel discussion on the Future Direction in Knowledge-Based Robotics. Section I of this book consists of four papers. It begins with a review of the basic concepts of computer vision, with emphasis on techniques specific for robot vision systems. The next paper pre sents a comprehensive 3-D vision system for robotic application.

An image or video sequence is a series of two-dimensional (2-D) images sequen tially ordered in time. Image sequences can be acquired, for instance, by video, motion picture, X-ray, or acoustic cameras, or they can be synthetically gen erated by sequentially ordering 2-D still images as in computer graphics and animation. The use of image sequences in areas such as entertainment, visual communications, multimedia, education, medicine, surveillance, remote control, and scientific research is constantly growing as the use of television and video systems are becoming more and more common. The boosted interest in digital video for both consumer and professional products, along with the availability of fast processors and memory at reasonable costs, has been a major driving force behind this growth. Before we elaborate on the two major terms that appear in the title of this book, namely motion analysis and image sequence processing, we like to place them in their proper contexts within the range of possible operations that involve image sequences. In this book, we choose to classify these operations into three major categories, namely (i) image sequence processing, (ii) image sequence analysis, and (iii) visualization. The interrelationship among these three categories is pictorially described in Figure 1 below in the form of an "image sequence triangle".