The systematic scientific investigation of human perception began over 130 years ago, yet relatively little is known about how we identify complex patterns. A major reason for this is that historically, most perceptual research focused on the more basic processes involved in the detection and discrimination of simple stimuli. This work progressed in a connectionist fashion, attempting to clarify fundamental mechanisms in depth before addressing the more complex problems of pattern recognition and classification. This extensive and impressive research effort built a firm basis from which to speculate about these issues. What seemed lacking, however, was an overall characterization of the recognition problem – a broad theoretical structure to direct future research in this area. Consequently, our primary objective in this volume, originally published in 1981, was not only to review existing contributions to our understanding of classification and recognition, but to project fruitful areas and directions for future research as well. The book covers four areas: complex visual patterns; complex auditory patterns; multi-dimensional perceptual spaces; theoretical pattern recognition.

This book presents a systematic study of visual pattern discovery, from unsupervised to semi-supervised manner approaches, and from dealing with a single feature to multiple types of features. Furthermore, it discusses the potential applications of discovering visual patterns for visual data analytics, including visual search, object and scene recognition. It is intended as a reference book for advanced undergraduates or postgraduate students who are interested in visual data analytics, enabling them to quickly access the research world and acquire a systematic methodology rather than a few isolated techniques to analyze visual data with large variations. It is also inspiring for researchers working in computer vision and pattern recognition fields. Basic knowledge of linear algebra, computer vision and pattern recognition would be helpful to readers.

Pattern Recognitions by Humans and Machines, Volume 2: Visual Perceptions covers aspects of research on visual perception. The book discusses visual form perception, figure-ground organization, and the spatial and temporal responses of the visual system; eye movements; and visual pattern perception. The text also describes a computer vision model based on psychophysical experiments; perspectives from brain theory and artificial intelligence; and the capacity to extract shape properties and spatial relations among objects and objects' parts. Knowledge-mediated perception is also considered. Psychologists and people involved in the study of visual perceptions will find the book useful.

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.

Instead of focusing on the mathematical properties of moments, this book is a compendium of research that demonstrates the effectiveness of orthogonal moment-based features in face recognition, expression recognition, fingerprint recognition and iris recognition. The usefulness of moments and their invariants in pattern recognition is well known. What is less well known is how orthogonal moments may be applied to specific problems in human-centric visual pattern recognition. Unlike previous books, this work highlights the fundamental issues involved in moment-based pattern recognition, from the selection of discriminative features in a high-dimensional setting, to addressing the question of how to classify a large number of patterns based on small training samples. In addition to offering new concepts that illustrate the use of statistical methods in addressing some of these issues, the book presents recent results and provides guidance on implementing the methods. Accordingly, it will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in the broad areas of computer vision and visual pattern recognition.