Dynamic scene analysis is essential for future robotic systems. This ESPRIT volume reports on research on dedicated architectures for managing real-time vision tasks. The papers reflect fundamental research as well as diverse practical applications.

Human and animal vision systems have been driven by the pressures of evolution to become capable of perceiving and reacting to their environments as close to instantaneously as possible. Casting such a goal of reactive vision into the framework of existing technology necessitates an artificial system capable of operating continuously, selecting and integrating information from an environment within stringent time delays. The YAP (Vision As Process) project embarked upon the study and development of techniques with this aim in mind. Since its conception in 1989, the project has successfully...

This volume has a dual significance to the ESPRIT Basic Research efforts towards forging strong links between European academic and industrial teams carrying out research, often interdisciplinary, at the forefront of Information Technology. Firstly, it consists of the proceedings of the "Symposium on Computational Logic" - held on the occasion of the 7th ESPRIT Conference Week in November 1990 - whose organisation was inspired by the work of Basic Research Action 3012 (COMPULOG). This is a consortium which has attracted world-wide interest, with requests for collaboration throughout Europe,...

This volume presents the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT conference of November 1991. The symposiumwas organized by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in the two domains. The proceedings contain ten invited papers from leading experts in language and speech research, together with a set of position papers from a panel session on 'Spoken language systems: technological goals and integration issues'. The papers cover a wide spectrum of research...

Geographical Information Systems are becoming increasingly important to geologists, geographers, and urban and environmental planners, amongst others. Although there is an increasing number of such systems available on the market, many questions of a theoretical nature need to be addressed, because of the inherently large amounts of data and the lack of appropriate models and languages. Also, there is a need for flexible and efficient usage of GIS, thus permitting their application in a broad range of new areas, such as navigation systems for transport and the automotive industry. ESPRIT...

As is true with most areas of Artificial Intelligence, there is real need for a symbiotic relationship between the biological and artificial - a need for problems to be viewed from many different angles, and particularly so in the study of vision. The INSIGHT consortium is taking steps in this direction. In a traditional sense, the papers in this volume are represented by the areas of neuroscience, psychophysics and traditional computer vision. However, to gain deeper insight into vision processes, it is the interaction of scientific ideas from these areas that is essential. The scope of the...

Research in optical information technology in Europe has been very active inrecent years. This volume records state-of-the-art research conducted in some 22 laboratories who have worked together within EC ESPRIT Basic Research Action 3199 up to 1992. The topics cover: (1) Active optical logic and switching devices - embracing new materials, nonlinear and electrooptic mechanisms as well as advanced device fabrication. These devices cover the range from all-optical nonlinear interferometer structures through hybrid optical-electronic modulators to integrated emitter-receiver structures. (2) The...

This book provides an overview of the work of two successive ESPRIT Basic Research Projects on Predictably Dependable Computing Systems (PDCS), as well as their major achievements. The purpose of the projects has been "to contribute to making the process of designing and constructing dependable computing systems much more predictable and cost-effective." The book contains a carefully edited selection of papers on all four main topics in PDCS: fault prevention, fault tolerance, fault removal, and fault forecasting. Problems of real-time and distributed systems, system structuring, qualitative...

This book describes recent developments in optical techniques for extracting surface and interface information with a resolution of less than a single atomic layer. These new "epioptic" techniques have now been quite widely applied to semiconductor surfaces and interfaces, and include polarised reflection techniques such as reflection anisotropy spectroscopy and spectroscopic ellipsometry, Raman scattering, and optical second harmonic and sum frequency generation. Epioptics has great potential in the area of growth monitoring, and in situ monitoring of semiconductor growth with submonolayer...

It is widely recognized that the complexity of parallel and distributed systems is such that proper tools must be employed during their design stage in order to achieve the quantitative goals for which they are intended. This volume collects recent research results obtained within the Basic Research Action Qmips, which bears on the quantitative analysis of parallel and distributed architectures. Part 1 is devoted to research on the usage of general formalisms stemming from theoretical computer science in quantitative performance modeling of parallel systems. It contains research papers on...