Muhammad Sarfraz

Geometric Modeling: Techniques, Applications, Systems and Tools

December 2003, ISBN 1-4020-1817-7, Hardbound

This book aims to provide a valuable source, which focuses on interdisciplinary methods and affiliate research in the area of Geometric Modeling and Graphics. It aims to provide the user community with a variety of Geometric Modeling techniques, applications, systems and tools necessary for various real life problems in areas such as Designing objects, Medical Visualization, Scientific Data Visualization, Archaeology, Toon Rendering, Virtual Reality, Body Simulation, etc. It also aims to collect and disseminate information from various disciplines including Curve and Surface Fitting, Geometric Algorithms, Scientific Visualization, Shape Abstraction and Modeling, Intelligent CAD Systems, Computational Geometry, Solid Modeling, Shape Analysis and Description, Medical and Industrial Applications. The major goal of this book is to stimulate views and provide a source where researchers and practitioners can find the latest developments in the field of Geometric Modeling and related practical issues. The book is useful for researchers, practicing engineers, computer scientists, and many others who seek state of the art techniques, applications, systems and tools for Geometric Modeling and Graphics. The book will be a useful source of ideas and techniques for those who seek further research and practice in the development and applications of Computer Aided Geometric Modeling. The introduction to various techniques and applications, together with the developed systems and tools, may serve to stimulate the interest of undergraduate senior students as well as graduate students in the areas of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. The book consists of twenty-two well documented chapters distributed in three sections of Geometric Modeling Techniques, Applications, Systems and Tools.

Edmund Husserl, Dallas Willard

Philosophy of Arithmetic
Psychological and Logical Investigations - with Supplementary Texts from 1887-1901

September 2003, ISBN 1-4020-1603-4, Paperback

Book Series: EDMUND HUSSERL Collected Works : Volume 10
Translated from the German

In his first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, Edmund Husserl provides a carefully worked out account of number as a categorial or formal feature of the objective world, and of arithmetic as a symbolic technique for mastering the infinite field of numbers for knowledge. It is a realist account of numbers and number relations that interweaves them into the basic structure of the universe and into our knowledge of reality. It provides an answer to the question of how arithmetic applies to reality, and gives an account of how, in general, formalized systems of symbols work in providing access to the world. The "appendices" to this book provide some of Husserl's subsequent discussions of how formalisms work, involving David Hilbert's program of completeness for arithmetic. "Completeness" is integrated into Husserl's own problematic of the "imaginary", and allows him to move beyond the analysis of "representations" in his understanding of the logic of mathematics.

Husserl's work here provides an alternative model of what "conceptual analysis" should be ? minus the "linguistic turn", but inclusive of language and linguistic meaning. In the process, he provides case after case of "Phenomenological Analysis" ? fortunately unencumbered by that title ? of the convincing type that made Husserl's life and thought a fountainhead of much of the most important philosophical work of the twentieth Century in Europe. Many Husserlian themes to be developed at length in later writings first emerge here: Abstraction, internal time consciousness, polythetic acts, acts of higher order ('founded' acts), Gestalt qualities and their role in knowledge, formalization (as opposed to generalization), essence analysis, and so forth.

This volume is a window on a period of rich and illuminating philosophical activity that has been rendered generally inaccessible by the supposed "revolution" attributed to "Analytic Philosophy" so-called. Careful exposition and critique is given to every serious alternative account of number and number relations available at the time. Husserl's extensive and trenchant criticisms of Gottlob Frege's theory of number and arithmetic reach far beyond those most commonly referred to in the literature on their views.

Alain Berlinet, Christine Thomas-Agnan

Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces in Probability and Statistics

December 2003, ISBN 1-4020-7679-7, Hardbound

Since the first papers laying its foundations as a subfield of Complex Analysis the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) has proved to be a powerful tool in many fields of Pure and Applied Mathematics, and in particular in Probability and Statistics. Nowadays, the applied mathematician who wants to understand applications or handle problems involving RKHS has to refer to papers scattered in a huge body of literature. Therefore we felt the need for a textbook gathering the main points of the theory in a unified, friendly and up to date fashion and presenting an accurate picture of its applications in Probability and Statistics.

The fact that reproducing kernels are covariance functions explains the early role of RKHS in inference problems on stochastic processes. The continuous rise of applications of RKHS theory and the recent burst of the field of Support Vector Machines attest that the scope of its applications is far from being exhausted.

The book covers theoretical questions including the latest extension of the formalism (therefore of interest to pure mathematicians), as well as more practical ones such as computational issues. It focuses on some of the more fruitful and promising applications, including statistical signal processing, nonparametric curve estimation, random measures, limit theorems, learning theory and some applications at the fringe between Statistics and Approximation Theory. The intention is to put together topics apparently different but sharing the same background. The text is geared to graduate students in Statistics, Mathematics or Engineering, or to scientists with an equivalent level. A lot of examples and applications are given and the book contains a broad variety of exercises so that it can be used as a textbook at a postgraduate level.

Bir Bhanu, Xuejun Tan

Computational Algorithms for Fingerprint Recognition

November 2003, ISBN 1-4020-7651-7, Hardbound

Book Series: THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES ON BIOMETRICS : Volume 1

Biometrics such as fingerprint, face, gait, iris, voice and signature, recognizes one's identity using his/her physiological or behavioral characteristics. Among these biometric signs, fingerprint has been researched the longest period of time, and shows the most promising future in real-world applications. However, because of the complex distortions among the different impressions of the same finger, fingerprint recognition is still a challenging problem.

Computational Algorithms For Fingerprint Recognition presents an entire range of novel computational algorithms for fingerprint recognition. These include feature extraction, indexing, matching, classification, and performance prediction/validation methods, which have been compared with state-of-art algorithms and found to be effective and efficient on real-world data. All the algorithms have been evaluated on NIST-4 database from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Specific algorithms addressed include:

Learned template based minutiae extraction algorithm,
Triplets of minutiae based fingerprint indexing algorithm,
Genetic algorithm based fingerprint matching algorithm,
Genetic programming based feature learning algorithm for fingerprint classification,
Comparison of classification and indexing based approaches for identification,
Fundamental fingerprint matching performance prediction analysis and its validation.
Computational Algorithms For Fingerprint Recognition is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and engineering