This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Brain, Vision and Artificial Intelligence, BVAI 2005, held in Naples, Italy in October 2005.

The 48 revised papers presented together with 6 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 80 submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are addressed to the following main topics and sub-topics: brain basics - neuroanatomy and physiology, development, plasticity and learning, synaptic, neuronic and neural network modelling; natural vision - visual neurosciences, mechanisms and model systems, visual perception, visual cognition; artificial vision - shape perception, shape analysis and recognition, shape understanding; artificial inteligence - hybrid intelligent systems, agents, and cognitive models.