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Bio-Inspired Hybrid Intelligent Systems for Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition comprises papers on diverse aspects of bio-inspired models, soft computing and hybrid intelligent systems. The articles are divided into four main parts. The first one consists of papers that propose new fuzzy and bio-inspired models to solve general problems. The second part deals with the main theme of modular neural networks in pattern recognition, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques. The third part contains papers that apply hybrid intelligent systems to the problem of time series analysis and prediction, while the fourth one shows papers dealing with bio-inspired models in optimization and robotics applications. An edited book in which both theoretical and application aspects are covered.

This book contains extended versions of selected papers from the 3rd edition of the International Symposium CompIMAGE.These contributions include cover methods of signal and image processing and analysis to tackle problems found in medicine, material science, surveillance, biometric, robotics, defence, satellite data, traffic analysis and architecture, image segmentation, 2D and 3D reconstruction, data acquisition, interpolation and registration, data visualization, motion and deformation analysis and 3D vision.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, IWCIA 2012, held in Austin, TX, USA in November 2012. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The topics covered include digital geometry, combinatorics in digital spaces, digital curves and surfaces; digital topologyl grammars, transformation, applications; grammars and models in image analysis; picture transformations, morphologic operations, image segmentation; and discrete tomography, applications.

This book is a collection of scientific papers published during the last five years, showing a broad spectrum of actual research topics and techniques used to solve challenging problems in the areas of computer vision and image analysis. The book will appeal to researchers, technicians and graduate students.

Computer vision and image analysis are indispensable components of every automated environment. Modern machine vision and image analysis techniques play key roles in automation and quality assurance. Working environments can be improved significantly if we integrate computer vision and image analysis techniques. The more advancement in innovation and research in computer vision and image processing, the greater the efficiency of machines as well as humans. Computer Vision and Image Analysis for Industry 4.0 focuses on the roles of computer vision and image analysis for 4.0 IR-related technologies. The text proposes a variety of techniques for disease detection and prediction, text recognition and signature verification, image captioning, flood level assessment, crops classifications and fabrication of smart eye-controlled wheelchairs.

Biomedical Image Synthesis and Simulation: Methods and Applications presents the basic concepts and applications in image-based simulation and synthesis used in medical and biomedical imaging. The first part of the book introduces and describes the simulation and synthesis methods that were developed and successfully used within the last twenty years, from parametric to deep generative models. The second part gives examples of successful applications of these methods. Both parts together form a book that gives the reader insight into the technical background of image synthesis and how it is used, in the particular disciplines of medical and biomedical imaging. The book ends with several perspectives on the best practices to adopt when validating image synthesis approaches, the crucial role that uncertainty quantification plays in medical image synthesis, and research directions that should be worth exploring in the future. - Gives state-of-the-art methods in (bio)medical image synthesis - Explains the principles (background) of image synthesis methods - Presents the main applications of biomedical image synthesis methods

This book opens with an introduction to the main purpose and tasks of the GIANA challenge, as well as a summary and an analysis of the results and performance obtained by the 20 participating teams. The early and accurate diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases is critical for increasing the chances of patient survival, and efficient screening is vital for locating precursor lesions. Video colonoscopy and wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) are the gold-standard tools for colon and intestinal tract screening, respectively. Yet these tools still present some drawbacks, such as lesion miss rate, lack of in vivo diagnosis capabilities, and perforation risk. To mitigate these, computer-aided detection/diagnosis systems can play a key role in assisting clinicians in the different stages of the exploration.This book presents the latest, state-of-the-art approaches in this field, and also tackles the clinical considerations required to efficiently deploy these systems in the exploration room. The coverage draws upon results from the Gastrointestinal Image Analysis (GIANA) Challenge, part of the EndoVis satellite events of the conferences MICCAI 2017 and 2018. Each method proposed to address the different subtasks of the challenges is detailed in a separate chapter, offering a deep insight into this topic of interest for public health.This book appeals to researchers, practitioners, and lecturers spanning both the computer vision and gastroenterology communities.

The book discusses major technical advances and research findings in the field of machine intelligence in medical image analysis. It examines the latest technologies and that have been implemented in clinical practice, such as computational intelligence in computer-aided diagnosis, biological image analysis, and computer-aided surgery and therapy. This book provides insights into the basic science involved in processing, analysing, and utilising all aspects of advanced computational intelligence in medical decision-making based on medical imaging.

Understanding how a single shape can incur a complex range of transformations, while defining the same perceptually obvious figure, entails a rich and challenging collection of problems, at the interface between applied mathematics, statistics and computer science. The program on Mathematics of Shapes and Applications, was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore in 2016. It provided discussions on theoretical developments and numerous applications in computer vision, object recognition and medical imaging.The analysis of shapes is an example of a mathematical problem directly connected with applications while offering deep open challenges to theoretical mathematicians. It has grown, over the past decades, into an interdisciplinary area in which researchers studying infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifolds (global analysis) interact with applied mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and biomedical engineers on a variety of problems involving shapes.The volume illustrates this wealth of subjects by providing new contributions on the metric structure of diffeomorphism groups and shape spaces, recent developments on deterministic and stochastic models of shape evolution, new computational methods manipulating shapes, and new statistical tools to analyze shape datasets. In addition to these contributions, applications of shape analysis to medical imaging and computational anatomy are discussed, leading, in particular, to improved understanding of the impact of cognitive diseases on the geometry of the brain.

The book describes various texture feature extraction approaches and texture analysis applications. It introduces and discusses the importance of texture features, and describes various types of texture features like statistical, structural, signal-processed and model-based. It also covers applications related to texture features, such as facial imaging. It is a valuable resource for machine vision researchers and practitioners in different application areas.

A concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media.Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and other dictators routinely doctored photographs so that the images aligned with their messages. They erased people who were there, added people who were not, and manipulated backgrounds. They knew if they changed the visual record, they could change history. Once, altering images required hours in the darkroom; today, it can be done with a keyboard and mouse. Because photographs are so easily faked, fake photos are everywhere—supermarket tabloids, fashion magazines, political ads, and social media. How can we tell if an image is real or false? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Hany Farid offers a concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media.Farid, an expert in photo forensics, has spent two decades developing techniques for authenticating digital images. These techniques model the entire image-creation process in order to find the digital disruption introduced by manipulation of the image. Each section of the book describes a different technique for analyzing an image, beginning with those requiring minimal technical expertise and advancing to those at intermediate and higher levels. There are techniques for, among other things, reverse image searches, metadata analysis, finding image imperfections introduced by JPEG compression, image cloning, tracing pixel patterns, and detecting images that are computer generated. In each section, Farid describes the techniques, explains when they should be applied, and offers examples of image analysis.

This book focuses on the fundamentals and recent advances in RGB-D imaging as well as covering a range of RGB-D applications. The topics covered include: data acquisition, data quality assessment, filling holes, 3D reconstruction, SLAM, multiple depth camera systems, segmentation, object detection, salience detection, pose estimation, geometric modelling, fall detection, autonomous driving, motor rehabilitation therapy, people counting and cognitive service robots. The availability of cheap RGB-D sensors has led to an explosion over the last five years in the capture and application of colour plus depth data. The addition of depth data to regular RGB images vastly increases the range of applications, and has resulted in a demand for robust and real-time processing of RGB-D data. There remain many technical challenges, and RGB-D image processing is an ongoing research area. This book covers the full state of the art, and consists of a series of chapters by internationally renowned experts in the field. Each chapter is written so as to provide a detailed overview of that topic. RGB-D Image Analysis and Processing will enable both students and professional developers alike to quickly get up to speed with contemporary techniques, and apply RGB-D imaging in their own projects.

Thanks to recent advances in sensors, communication and satellite technology, data storage, processing and networking capabilities, satellite image acquisition and mining are now on the rise. In turn, satellite images play a vital role in providing essential geographical information. Highly accurate automatic classification and decision support systems can facilitate the efforts of data analysts, reduce human error, and allow the rapid and rigorous analysis of land use and land cover information. Integrating Machine Learning (ML) technology with the human visual psychometric can help meet geologists'demands for more efficient and higher-quality classification in real time. This book introduces readers to key concepts, methods and models for satellite image analysis; highlights state-of-the-art classification and clustering techniques; discusses recent developments and remaining challenges; and addresses various applications, making it a valuable asset for engineers, data analysts and researchers in the fields of geographic information systems and remote sensing engineering.

This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image.The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.

The book focuses on one of the key issues in document image processing – graphical symbol recognition, which is a sub-field of the larger research domain of pattern recognition. It covers several approaches: statistical, structural and syntactic, and discusses their merits and demerits considering the context. Through comprehensive experiments, it also explores whether these approaches can be combined. The book presents research problems, state-of-the-art methods that convey basic steps as well as prominent techniques, evaluation metrics and protocols, and research standpoints/directions that are associated with it. However, it is not limited to straightforward isolated graphics (visual patterns) recognition; it also addresses complex and composite graphical symbols recognition, which is motivated by real-world industrial problems.

This book presents contributions in the field of computational intelligence for the purpose of image analysis. The chapters discuss how problems such as image segmentation, edge detection, face recognition, feature extraction, and image contrast enhancement can be solved using techniques such as genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. The contributions provide a multidimensional approach, and the book will be useful for researchers in computer science, electrical engineering, and information technology.

This book examines paintings using a computational and quantitative approach. Specifically, it compares paintings to photographs, addressing the strengths and limitations of both. Particular aesthetic practices are examined such as the vista, foreground to background organisation and the depth planes. These are analysed using a range of computational approaches and clear observations are made. New generations of image-capture devices such as Google goggles and the light field camera, promise a future in which the formal attributes of a photograph are made available for editing to a degree that has hitherto been the exclusive territory of painting. In this sense paintings and photographs are converging, and it therefore seems an opportune time to study the comparisons between them. In this context, the book includes cutting-edge work examining how some of the aesthetic attributes of a painting can be transferred to a photograph using the latest computational approaches.

This is the first book offering a systematic description of tongue image analysis and processing technologies and their typical applications in computerized tongue diagnostic (CTD) systems. It features the most current research findings in all aspects of tongue image acquisition, preprocessing, classification, and diagnostic support methodologies, from theoretical and algorithmic problems to prototype design and development of CTD systems. The book begins with a very in-depth description of CTD on a need-to-know basis which includes an overview of CTD systems and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in order to provide the information on the context and background of tongue image analysis. The core part then introduces algorithms as well as their implementation methods, at a know-how level, including image segmentation methods, chromatic correction, and classification of tongue images. Some clinical applications based on these methods are presented for the show-how purpose in the CTD research field. Case studies highlight different techniques that have been adopted to assist the visual inspection of appendicitis, diabetes, and other common diseases. Experimental results under different challenging clinical circumstances have demonstrated the superior performance of these techniques. In this book, the principles of tongue image analysis are illustrated with plentiful graphs, tables, and practical experiments to provide insights into some of the problems. In this way, readers can easily find a quick and systematic way through the complicated theories and they can later even extend their studies to special topics of interest. This book will be of benefit to researchers, professionals, and graduate students working in the field of computer vision, pattern recognition, clinical practice, and TCM, as well as those involved in interdisciplinary research.

This book introduces new techniques for cellular image feature extraction, pattern recognition and classification. The authors use the antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) in patient serum as the subjects and the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) technique as the imaging protocol to illustrate the applications of the described methods. Throughout the book, the authors provide evaluations for the proposed methods on two publicly available human epithelial (HEp-2) cell datasets: ICPR2012 dataset from the ICPR'12 HEp-2 cell classification contest and ICIP2013 training dataset from the ICIP'13 Competition on cells classification by fluorescent image analysis. First, the reading of imaging results is significantly influenced by one's qualification and reading systems, causing high intra- and inter-laboratory variance. The authors present a low-order LP21 fiber mode for optical single cell manipulation and imaging staining patterns of HEp-2 cells. A focused four-lobed mode distribution is stable and effective in optical tweezer applications, including selective cell pick-up, pairing, grouping or separation, as well as rotation of cell dimers and clusters. Both translational dragging force and rotational torque in the experiments are in good accordance with the theoretical model. With a simple all-fiber configuration, and low peak irradiation to targeted cells, instrumentation of this optical chuck technology will provide a powerful tool in the ANA-IIF laboratories. Chapters focus on the optical, mechanical and computing systems for the clinical trials. Computer programs for GUI and control of the optical tweezers are also discussed. to more discriminative local distance vector by searching for local neighbors of the local feature in the class-specific manifolds. Encoding and pooling the local distance vectors leads to salient image representation. Combined with the traditional coding methods, this method achieves higherclassification accuracy. Then, a rotation invariant textural feature of Pairwise Local Ternary Patterns with Spatial Rotation Invariant (PLTP-SRI) is examined. It is invariant to image rotations, meanwhile it is robust to noise and weak illumination. By adding spatial pyramid structure, this method captures spatial layout information. While the proposed PLTP-SRI feature extracts local feature, the BoW framework builds a global image representation. It is reasonable to combine them together to achieve impressive classification performance, as the combined feature takes the advantages of the two kinds of features in different aspects. Finally, the authors design a Co-occurrence Differential Texton (CoDT) feature to represent the local image patches of HEp-2 cells. The CoDT feature reduces the information loss by ignoring the quantization while it utilizes the spatial relations among the differential micro-texton feature. Thus it can increase the discriminative power. A generative model adaptively characterizes the CoDT feature space of the training data. Furthermore, exploiting a discriminant representation allows for HEp-2 cell images based on the adaptive partitioned feature space. Therefore, the resulting representation is adapted to the classification task. By cooperating with linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, this framework can exploit the advantages of both generative and discriminative approaches for cellular image classification. The book is written for those researchers who would like to develop their own programs, and the working MatLab codes are included for all the important algorithms presented. It can also be used as a reference book for graduate students and senior undergraduates in the area of biomedical imaging, image feature extraction, pattern recognition and classification. Academics, researchers, and professional will find this to be an exceptional resour

With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced computational techniques for solving practical biomedical and life science problems. This book is for users in the fields of biomedical and life sciences who wish to keep abreast with the latest techniques in signal and image analysis. The book presents a detailed description to each of the applications. It can be used by those both at graduate and specialist levels.

This book provides a view of low-rank and sparse computing, especially approximation, recovery, representation, scaling, coding, embedding and learning among unconstrained visual data. The book includes chapters covering multiple emerging topics in this new field. It links multiple popular research fields in Human-Centered Computing, Social Media, Image Classification, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, Big Data, and Human-Computer Interaction. Contains an overview of the low-rank and sparse modeling techniques for visual analysis by examining both theoretical analysis and real-world applications.

Automatic detection and segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images are prerequisites to subsequent image measurements and disease quantification, and therefore have multiple clinical applications. This book presents an efficient object detection and segmentation framework, called Marginal Space Learning, which runs at a sub-second speed on a current desktop computer, faster than the state-of-the-art. Trained with a sufficient number of data sets, Marginal Space Learning is also robust under imaging artifacts, noise and anatomical variations. The book showcases 35 clinical applications of Marginal Space Learning and its extensions to detecting and segmenting various anatomical structures, such as the heart, liver, lymph nodes and prostate in major medical imaging modalities (CT, MRI, X-Ray and Ultrasound), demonstrating its efficiency and robustness.

With strong numerical and computational focus, this book serves as an essential resource on the methods for functional neuroimaging analysis, diffusion weighted image analysis, and longitudinal VBM analysis. It includes four MRI image modalities analysis methods. The first covers the PWI methods, which is the basis for understanding cerebral flow in human brain. The second part, the book's core, covers fMRI methods in three specific domains: first level analysis, second level analysis, and effective connectivity study. The third part covers the analysis of Diffusion weighted image, i.e. DTI, QBI and DSI image analysis. Finally, the book covers (longitudinal) VBM methods and its application to Alzheimer's disease study.

This book focuses on interactive segmentation techniques, which have been extensively studied in recent decades. Interactive segmentation emphasizes clear extraction of objects of interest, whose locations are roughly indicated by human interactions based on high level perception. This book will first introduce classic graph-cut segmentation algorithms and then discuss state-of-the-art techniques, including graph matching methods, region merging and label propagation, clustering methods, and segmentation methods based on edge detection. A comparative analysis of these methods will be provided with quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation, which will be illustrated using natural and synthetic images. Also, extensive statistical performance comparisons will be made. Pros and cons of these interactive segmentation methods will be pointed out, and their applications will be discussed. There have been only a few surveys on interactive segmentation techniques, and those surveys do not cover recent state-of-the art techniques. By providing comprehensive up-to-date survey on the fast developing topic and the performance evaluation, this book can help readers learn interactive segmentation techniques quickly and thoroughly.

Traditionally, say 15 years ago, three-dimensional image analysis (aka computer vi­ sion) and three-dimensional image synthesis (aka computer graphics) were separate fields. Rarely were expert

This accessible text/reference presents a coherent overview of the emerging field of non-Euclidean similarity learning. The book presents a broad range of perspectives on similarity-based pattern analysis and recognition methods, from purely theoretical challenges to practical, real-world applications. The coverage includes both supervised and unsupervised learning paradigms, as well as generative and discriminative models. Topics and features: explores the origination and causes of non-Euclidean (dis)similarity measures, and how they influence the performance of traditional classification algorithms; reviews similarity measures for non-vectorial data, considering both a “kernel tailoring” approach and a strategy for learning similarities directly from training data; describes various methods for “structure-preserving” embeddings of structured data; formulates classical pattern recognition problems from a purely game-theoretic perspective; examines two large-scale biomedical imagingapplications.

This book covers up-to-date methods and algorithms for the automated analysis of engineering drawings and digital cartographic maps. The Non-Deterministic Agent System (NDAS) offers a parallel computational approach to such image analysis. The book describes techniques suitable for persistent and explicit knowledge representation for engineering drawings and digital maps. It also highlights more specific techniques, e.g., applying robot navigation and mapping methods to this problem. Also included are more detailed accounts of the use of unsupervised segmentation algorithms to map images. Finally, all these threads are woven together in two related systems: NDAS and AMAM (Automatic Map Analysis Module).

Since the early 20th century, medical imaging has been dominated by monochrome imaging modalities such as x-ray, computed tomography, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging. As a result, color information has been overlooked in medical image analysis applications. Recently, various medical imaging modalities that involve color information have been introduced. These include cervicography, dermoscopy, fundus photography, gastrointestinal endoscopy, microscopy, and wound photography. However, in comparison to monochrome images, the analysis of color images is a relatively unexplored area. The multivariate nature of color image data presents new challenges for researchers and practitioners as the numerous methods developed for monochrome images are often not directly applicable to multichannel images.The goal of this volume is to summarize the state-of-the-art in the utilization of color information in medical image analysis.

'This book highlights the development of robust and effective vision-based motion understanding systems, addressing specific vision applications such as surveillance, sport event analysis, healthcare, video conferencing, and motion video indexing and retrieval'--Provided by publisher.

Pattern recognition basically deals with the recognition of patterns, shapes, objects, things in images. Document image analysis was one of the very?rst applications of pattern recognition and even of computing. But until the 1980s, research in this?eld was mainly dealing with text-based documents, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and page layout analysis. Only a few people were looking at more speci?c documents such as music sheet, bank cheques or forms. The community of graphics recognition became visible in the late 1980s. Their speci?c interest was to recognize high-level objects represented by line drawings and graphics. The speci?c pattern recognition problems they had to deal with was raster-to-graphics conversion (i.e., recognizing graphical primitives in a cluttered pixel image), text-graphics separation, and symbol recognition. The speci?c problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents has received a lot of attention. The symbols to be recognized can be musical notation, electrical symbols, architectural objects, pictograms in maps, etc. At?rst glance, the symbol recognition problems seems to be very similar to that of character recognition; - ter all, characters are basically a subset of symbols. Therefore, the large know-how in OCR has been extensively used in graphical symbol recognition: starting with segmenting the document to extract the symbols, extracting features from the s- bols, and then recognizing them through classi?cation or matching, with respect to a training/learning set.

The SECCHI A and B instrument suites (Howard et al., 2006) onboard the two STEREO mission spacecraft (Kaiser, 2005) are each composed of: one Extreme Ultra-Violet Imager (EUVI), two white-light coronagraphs (COR1 and COR2), and two wide-angle heliospheric imagers (HI1 and HI2). Technical descriptions of EUVI, COR1 and the HIs can be found in Wuelser et al. (2004), Thompson et al. (2003), and De?se et al. (2003), respectively. The images produced by SECCHI represent a data visualization challenge: i) the images are 2048×2048 pixels (except for the HIs, which are usually binned onboard 2×2), thus the vast majority of computer displays are not able to display them at full frame and full r- olution, and ii) more importantly, the?ve instruments of SECCHI A and B were designed to be able to track Coronal Mass Ejections from their onset (with EUVI) to their pro- gation in the heliosphere (with the HIs), which implies that a set of SECCHI images that covers the propagation of a CME from its initiation site to the Earth is composed of im-?1 ages with very different spatial resolutions – from 1. 7 arcsecondspixel for EUVI to 2. 15?1 arcminutespixel for HI2, i. e. 75 times larger. A similar situation exists with the angular scales of the physical objects, since the size of a CME varies by orders of magnitude as it expands in the heliosphere.

Several techniques have been developed in the literature for processing different aspects of the geometry of shapes, for representing and manipulating a shape at different levels of detail, and for describing a shape at a structural level as a concise, part-based, or iconic model. Such techniques are used in many different contexts, such as industrial design, biomedical applications, entertainment, environmental monitoring, or cultural heritage. This book covers a variety of topics related to preserving and enhancing shape information at a geometric level, and to effectively capturing the structure of a shape by identifying relevant shape components and their mutual relationships.

This book introduces the reader to a recent theory in Computer Vision yielding elementary techniques to analyse digital images. These techniques are inspired from and are a mathematical formalization of the Gestalt theory. Gestalt theory, which had never been formalized is a rigorous realm of vision psychology developped between 1923 and 1975. From the mathematical viewpoint the closest field to it is stochastic geometry, involving basic probability and statistics, in the context of image analysis. The book is intended for a multidisciplinary audience of researchers and engineers. It is self contained in three aspects: mathematics, vision and algorithms, and requires only a background of elementary calculus and probability. A large number of illustrations, exercises and examples are included. The authors maintain a public software, MegaWave, containing implementations of most of the image analysis techniques developed in the book.

The human visual system as a functional unit including the eyes, the nervous system, and the corresponding parts of the brain certainly ranks among the most important means of human information processing. The e?ciency of the biological systems is beyond the capabilities of today's technical systems, even with the fastest available computer systems. However, there are areas of application where digital image analysis systems produce acceptable results. Systems in these areas solve very specialized tasks, they operate in a limited environment, and high speed is often not necessary. Several factors determine the economical application of technical vision systems: cost, speed,?exibility, robu- ness, functionality, and integration with other system components. Many of the recent developments in digital image processing and pattern recognition show some of the required achievements. Computer vision enhances the capabilities of computer systems • in autonomously collecting large amounts of data, • in extracting relevant information, • in perceiving its environment, and • in automatic or semiautomatic operation in this environment. The development of computer systems in general shows a steadily increasing need in computational power, which comes with decreasing hardware costs.