This volume, in the ГГЕСН Vision Systems series of books, reports recent advances in the use of pattern recognition techniques for computer and robot vision. The sciences of pattern recognition and computational vision have been inextricably intertwined since their early days, some four decades ago with the emergence of fast digital computing. All computer vision techniques could be regarded as a form of pattern recognition, in the broadest sense of the term. Conversely'/ if one looks through the contents of a typical international pattern recognition conference proceedings, it appears that the large majority (perhaps 70-80%) of all pattern recognition papers are concerned with the analysis of images. In particular, these sciences overlap in areas of low-level vision such as segmentation, edge detection and other kinds of feature extraction and region identification, which are the focus of this book. Those who were research students in the 1980s may recall struggling to find enough example images in digital form with which to work. In contrast, since the 1990s there has been an explosive increase in the capture, storage and transmission of digital images. This growth is continuing apace, with the proliferation of cheap (even disposable) digital cameras, large scale efforts to digitally scan the world's written texts, increasing use of imaging in medicine, increasing use of visual surveillance systems and the display and transmission of images over the internet.
This growth is driving an acute demand for techniques for automatically managing and exploiting this vast resource of data. Intelligent machinery is needed which can search, recognize, sort and interpret the contents of images. Additionally, vision systems offer the potential to be the most powerful sensory inputs to robotic devices and are thus set to revolutionize industrial automation, surgery and other medical interventions, the security and military sectors, exploration of our oceans and outer space, transportation and many aspects of our daily lives. Computational intelligence, of which intelligent imaging is a central part, is also driving and driven by our inner search to understand the workings of the human brain, through the emerging interdisciplinary field of computational neuroscience...