Book 155


Book 3077

The fusion of di?erent information sourcesis a persistent and intriguing issue. It hasbeenaddressedforcenturiesinvariousdisciplines,includingpoliticalscience, probability and statistics, system reliability assessment, computer science, and distributed detection in communications. Early seminal work on fusion was c- ried out by pioneers such as Laplace and von Neumann. More recently, research activities in information fusion have focused on pattern recognition. During the 1990s,classi?erfusionschemes,especiallyattheso-calleddecision-level,emerged under a plethora of di?erent names in various scienti?c communities, including machine learning, neural networks, pattern recognition, and statistics. The d- ferent nomenclatures introduced by these communities re?ected their di?erent perspectives and cultural backgrounds as well as the absence of common forums and the poor dissemination of the most important results. In 1999, the ?rst workshop on multiple classi?er systems was organized with the main goal of creating a common international forum to promote the diss- ination of the results achieved in the diverse communities and the adoption of a common terminology, thus giving the di?erent perspectives and cultural ba- grounds some concrete added value. After ?ve meetings of this workshop, there is strong evidence that signi?cant steps have been made towards this goal. - searchers from these diverse communities successfully participated in the wo- shops, and world experts presented surveys of the state of the art from the perspectives of their communities to aid cross-fertilization.

Book 3271

We are delighted to present the proceedings of the 7th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks & Services (MMNS). The MMNS 2004 conference was held in San Diego, California, USA on October 4-6,2004.Asinpreviousyears,theconferencebroughttogether aninternational audience of researchers and scientists from industry and academia who are - searching and developing state-of-the-art management systems, while creating a public venue for results dissemination and intellectual collaboration. This year marked a challenging chapter in the advancement of management s- tems for the wider management researchcommunity, with the growing compl- ities ofthe Internet, the proliferationof alternativewireless networksandmobile services, intelligent and high-speed networks, scalable multimedia services, and the convergence of computing and communications for data and voice delivery. Contributions from the research community met this challenge with 84 paper submissions; 26 selected high-quality papers were subsequently selected to form the MMNS 2004 technical program.
The diverse topics in this year's program included novel protocols in wireless systems, multimedia over wireless, mobility management, multimedia service control, proactive techniques for QoS mana- ment, MPLStra?cengineeringandresiliency,distributedsystems management, scalable multimedia systems, and adaptive methods for streaming multimedia.

Book 3546

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Audio- and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication, AVBPA 2005, held in Hilton Rye Town, NY, USA, in July 2005.

The 66 revised oral papers and 50 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers discuss all aspects of biometrics including iris, fingerprint, face, palm print, gait, gesture, speaker, and signature; theoretical and algorithmic issues are dealt with as well as systems issues. The industrial side of biometrics is evident from presentations on smart cards, wireless devices, and architectural and implementation aspects.