This volume presents the articles accepted for the 8th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP'99), held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1{3 September 1999. The CAIP series of conferences started 14 years ago in Berlin. The series served initially as a forum for meetings between sci- tists from Western and Eastern-bloc countries. Political circumstances have changed dramatically since the inception of the conference and such contacts are fortunately no longer subject to abstrade. While CAIP conferences are still rooted in Central Europe, they now attract...

A representation of objects by their parts is the dominant strategy for representing complex 3D objects in many disciplines. In computer vision and robotics, superquadrics are among the most widespread part models. Superquadrics are a family of parametric models that cover a wide variety of smoothly changing 3D symmetric shapes, which are controlled with a small number of parameters and which can be augmented with the addition of global and local deformations. The book covers, in depth, the geometric properties of superquadrics. The main contribution of the book is an original approach to the...

Computer vision solutions used to be very specific and difficult to adapt to different or even unforeseen situations. The current development is calling for simple to use yet robust applications that could be employed in various situations. This trend requires the reassessment of some theoretical issues in computer vision. A better general understanding of vision processes, new insights and better theories are needed. The papers selected from the conference staged in Dagstuhl in 1996 to gather scientists from the West and the former eastern-block countries address these goals and cover such...