In a society where split-second decisions about the value of things are grounded on how they look, museum visitors are often drawn to visually striking or iconic objects. This book investigates the question of the treatment of items on display in museums which are less conspicuous but potentially just as important as the striking objects, arguing that it is important to show that all objects illustrate potentially interesting cultural contexts and content. The authors explore the disciplines of architecture, design, cognitive science and museology and offer a methodology by which the quality of museum exhibitions can be judged from a visitor-centred perspective. They provide new insights into the visitor-object encounter and the relationship between visitors, objects and museums. In addition the book offers a set of useful practical tools for museum professionals - for audience research, evaluating museum displays, and for designing new galleries and striking exhibitions. Richly illustrated with photos and diagrams, and based on studies of famous galleries in world-renowned museums, the book will be essential reading for all those concerned with creating effective exhibitions in museum.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval, AMR 2006, held in Geneva, Switzerland in July 2006. The papers cover ontology-based retrieval and annotation, ranking and similarity measurements, music information retrieval, visual modeling, adaptive retrieval, structuring multimedia, as well as user integration and profiling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, ICIAR 2008, held in Póvoa do Varzim, Portugal, in June 2008. The 110 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 226 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image restoration and enhancement, image and video segmentation, non-linear image processing, image and video coding and encryption, indexing and retrieval, computer vision, feature extraction and classification, shape representation and matching, object recognition, character recognition, texture and motion analysis, tracking, biomedical image analysis, biometrics, face recognition, and a special session on recent advances in multimodal biometric systems and applications.

At publication, The Control Handbook immediately became the definitive resource that engineers working with modern control systems required. Among its many accolades, that first edition was cited by the AAP as the Best Engineering Handbook of 1996. Now, 15 years later, William Levine has once again compiled the most comprehensive and authoritative resource on control engineering. He has fully reorganized the text to reflect the technical advances achieved since the last edition and has expanded its contents to include the multidisciplinary perspective that is making control engineering a critical component in so many fields. Now expanded from one to three volumes, The Control Handbook, Second Edition brilliantly organizes cutting-edge contributions from more than 200 leading experts representing every corner of the globe. They cover everything from basic closed-loop systems to multi-agent adaptive systems and from the control of electric motors to the control of complex networks. Progressively organized, the three volume set includes: Control System Fundamentals Control System Applications Control System Advanced Methods Any practicing engineer, student, or researcher working in fields as diverse as electronics, aeronautics, or biomedicine will find this handbook to be a time-saving resource filled with invaluable formulas, models, methods, and innovative thinking. In fact, any physicist, biologist, mathematician, or researcher in any number of fields developing or improving products and systems will find the answers and ideas they need. As with the first edition, the new edition not only stands as a record of accomplishment in control engineering but provides researchers with the means to make further advances.