Syntactic And Structural Pattern Recognition

This book is currently the only one on this subject containing both introductory material and advanced recent research results. It presents, at one end, fundamental concepts and notations developed in syntactic and structural pattern recognition and at the other, reports on the current state of the art with respect to both methodology and applications. In particular, it includes artificial intelligence related techniques, which are likely to become very important in future pattern recognition.The book consists of individual chapters written by different authors. The chapters are grouped into broader subject areas like “Syntactic Representation and Parsing”, “Structural Representation and Matching”, “Learning”, etc. Each chapter is a self-contained presentation of one particular topic. In order to keep the original flavor of each contribution, no efforts were undertaken to unify the different chapters with respect to notation. Naturally, the self-containedness of the individual chapters results in some redundancy. However, we believe that this handicap is compensated by the fact that each contribution can be read individually without prior study of the preceding chapters. A unification of the spectrum of material covered by the individual chapters is provided by the subject and author index included at the end of the book.

Thirty years ago pattern recognition was dominated by the learning machine concept: that one could automate the process of going from the raw data to a classifier. The derivation of numerical features from the input image was not considered an important step. One could present all possible features to a program which in turn could find which ones would be useful for pattern recognition. In spite of significant improvements in statistical inference techniques, progress was slow. It became clear that feature derivation was a very complex process that could not be automated and that features could be symbolic as well as numerical. Furthennore the spatial relationship amongst features might be important. It appeared that pattern recognition might resemble language analysis since features could play the role of symbols strung together to form a word. This led. to the genesis of syntactic pattern recognition, pioneered in the middle and late 1960's by Russel Kirsch, Robert Ledley, Nararimhan, and Allan Shaw. However the thorough investigation of the area was left to King-Sun Fu and his students who, until his untimely death, produced most of the significant papers in this area. One of these papers (syntactic recognition of fingerprints) received the distinction of being selected as the best paper published that year in the IEEE Transaction on Computers. Therefore syntactic pattern recognition has a long history of active research and has been used in industrial applications.

This volume contains all papers presented at SSPR 2002 and SPR 2002 hosted by the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, August 6-9, 2002. This was the third time these two workshops were held back-to-back. SSPR was the ninth International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and the SPR was the fourth International Workshop on Statis- cal Techniques in Pattern Recognition. These workshops have traditionally been held in conjunction with ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recog- tion), and are the major events for technical committees TC2 and TC1, resp- tively, of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The workshops were held in parallel and closely coordinated. This was an attempt to resolve the dilemma of how to deal, in the light of the progressive specialization of pattern recognition, with the need for narrow-focus workshops without further fragmenting the ?eld and introducing yet another conference that would compete for the time and resources of potential participants. A total of 116 papers were received from many countries with the submission and reviewingprocesses beingcarried out separately for each workshop. A total of 45 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 35 for posters. In addition four invited speakers presented informative talks and overviews of their research. They were: Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University, USA Sven Dickinson, the University of Toronto, Canada Edwin Hancock, University of York, UK Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA SSPR 2002 and SPR 2002 were sponsored by the IAPR and the University of Windsor.

The many different mathematical techniques used to solve pattem recognition problems may be grouped into two general approaches: the decision-theoretic (or discriminant) approach and the syntactic (or structural) approach. In the decision-theoretic approach, aset of characteristic measurements, called features, are extracted from the pattems. Each pattem is represented by a feature vector, and the recognition of each pattem is usually made by partitioning the feature space. Applications of decision-theoretic approach indude character recognition, medical diagnosis, remote sensing, reliability and socio-economics. A relatively new approach is the syntactic approach. In the syntactic approach, ea ch pattem is expressed in terms of a composition of its components. The recognition of a pattem is usually made by analyzing the pattem structure according to a given set of rules. Earlier applications of the syntactic approach indude chromosome dassification, English character recognition and identification of bubble and spark chamber events. The purpose of this monograph is to provide a summary of the major reeent applications of syntactic pattem recognition. After a brief introduction of syntactic pattem recognition in Chapter 1, the nin e mai n chapters (Chapters 2-10) can be divided into three parts. The first three chapters concem with the analysis of waveforms using syntactic methods. Specific application examples indude peak detection and interpretation of electro cardiograms and the recognition of speech pattems. The next five chapters deal with the syntactic recognition of two-dimensional pictorial pattems.

The very significant advances in computer vision and pattern recognition and their applications in the last few years reflect the strong and growing interest in the field as well as the many opportunities and challenges it offers. The second edition of this handbook represents both the latest progress and updated knowledge in this dynamic field. The applications and technological issues are particularly emphasized in this edition to reflect the wide applicability of the field in many practical problems. To keep the book in a single volume, it is not possible to retain all chapters of the first edition. However, the chapters of both editions are well written for permanent reference. This indispensable handbook will continue to serve as an authoritative and comprehensive guide in the field.

This unique compendium presents the major methods of recognition and learning used in syntactic pattern recognition from the 1960s till 2018. Each method is introduced firstly in a formal way. Then, it is explained with the help of examples and its algorithms are described in a pseudocode. The survey of the applications contains more than 1,000 sources published since the 1960s. The open problems in the field, the challenges and the determinants of the future development of syntactic pattern recognition are discussed.This must-have volume provides a good read and serves as an excellent source of reference materials for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of pattern recognition, machine perception, computer vision and artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition, SSPR 2004 and the 5th International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SPR 2004, held jointly in Lisbon, Portugal, in August 2004. The 59 revised full papers and 64 revised poster papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on graphs; visual recognition and detection; contours, lines, and paths; matching and superposition; transduction and translation; image and video analysis; syntactics, languages, and strings; human shape and action; sequences and graphs; pattern matching and classification; document image analysis; shape analysis; multiple classifier systems; density estimation; clustering; feature selection; classification; and representation.