We are living in the era of "Big Data" and the computing power required to deal with "Big Data" both in terms of its energy consumption and technical complexity is one of the key areas of research and development. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that centralized computing infrastructures (data centres)...

Nowadays, highly-detailed animations of live-actor performances are increasingly easier to acquire and 3D Video has reached considerable attentions in visual media production. In this book, we address the problem of extracting or acquiring and then reusing non-rigid parametrization for video-based animations. At first sight, a crucial...

Autonomous robots must carry out useful tasks all by themselves relying entirely on their own perceptions of their environment. The cognitive abilities required for autonomous action are largely independent of robot size, which makes mini robots attractive as artefacts for research, education and entertainment. Autonomous mini robots must be...

• Detect an intruder on camera and set off an alarm
• Listen in or record conversations from a distance
• Find out what the other computers on your network are up to
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This book presents a unified view of image motion analysis under the variational framework. Variational methods, rooted in physics and mechanics, but appearing in many other domains, such as statistics, control, and computer vision, address a problem from an optimization standpoint, i.e., they formulate it as the optimization of an objective...

The field of structured P2P systems has seen fast growth upon the introduction of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) in the early 2000s. The first proposals, including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, were gradually improved to cope with scalability, locality and security issues. By utilizing the processing and bandwidth resources  of end users, the...

Mobile Authentication: Problems and Solutions looks at human-to-machine authentication, with a keen focus on the mobile scenario. Human-to-machine authentication is a startlingly complex issue. In the old days of computer security-before 2000, the human component was all but disregarded. It was either assumed that people should and...

Physical layer security has recently become an emerging technique to complement and significantly improve the communication security of wireless networks. Compared to cryptographic approaches, physical layer security is a fundamentally different paradigm where secrecy is achieved by exploiting the physical layer properties of the...

Bilevel programming problems are hierarchical optimization problems where the constraints of one problem (the so-called upper level problem) are defined in part by a second parametric optimization problem (the lower level problem). If the lower level problem has a unique optimal solution for all parameter values, this problem is equivalent to...

The scope of orthopedic knowledge has expanded to such a degree that it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a fundamental grasp of the required knowledge base. This is compounded by the time constraints on adult learning, with the student or practitioner faced with ever-increasing demands on their time. This text is a much needed...

Scalable Big Data Architecture covers real-world,...

• Get to grips with the application of Machine Learning methods using an extensive set of R packages
• Understand the benefits and potential pitfalls of using machine learning methods
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