This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Fourth International Workshop on Parallel Image Analysis, held at the Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallelisme of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France. It is representative of the traditional topics of the workshop, from theoretical models for parallel image analysis to real life applications implemented on parallel multicomputers.

In recent years, rapid progress has been made in computer processing of oriental languages, and the research developments in this area hay resulted in tremendous changes in handwriting processing, printed oriental character recognition, document analysis and recognition, automatic input methodologies for oriental languages, etc. Advances in computer processing of oriental languages can also be seen in multimedia computing and the World Wide Web. Many of the results in those domains are presented in this book.

The field of biometrics utilizes computer models of the physical and behavioral characteristics of human beings with a view to reliable personal identification. The human characteristics of interest include visual images, speech, and indeed anything which might help to uniquely identify the individual. The other side of the biometrics coin is biometric synthesis -- rendering biometric phenomena from their corresponding computer models. For example, we could generate a synthetic face from its corresponding computer model. Such a model could include muscular dynamics to model the full gamut of...