Science has made great progress in the twentieth century, with the establishment of proper disciplines in the fields of physics, computer science, molecular biology, and many others. At the same time, there have also emerged many engineering ideas that are interdisciplinary in nature, beyond the realm of such orthodox disciplines. These in clude, for example, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, evolutional computation, data mining, and so on. In or der to generate new technology that is truly human-friendly in the twenty-first century, integration of various methods beyond specific disciplines is required. Soft computing is a key concept for the creation of such human friendly technology in our modern information society. Professor Rutkowski is a pioneer in this field, having devoted himself for many years to publishing a large variety of original work. The present vol ume, based mostly on his own work, is a milestone in the devel opment of soft computing, integrating various disciplines from the fields of information science and engineering. The book consists of three parts, the first of which is devoted to probabilistic neural net works. Neural excitation is stochastic, so it is natural to investi gate the Bayesian properties of connectionist structures developed by Professor Rutkowski. This new approach has proven to be par ticularly useful for handling regression and classification problems vi Preface in time-varying environments. Throughout this book, major themes are selected from theoretical subjects that are tightly connected with challenging applications.

Science has made great progress in the twentieth century, with the establishment of proper disciplines in the fields of physics, computer science, molecular biology, and many others. At the same time, there have also emerged many engineering ideas that are interdisciplinary in nature, beyond the realm of such orthodox disciplines. These in clude, for example, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, evolutional computation, data mining, and so on. In or der to generate new technology that is truly human-friendly in the twenty-first century, integration of various methods beyond specific disciplines is required. Soft computing is a key concept for the creation of such human friendly technology in our modern information society. Professor Rutkowski is a pioneer in this field, having devoted himself for many years to publishing a large variety of original work. The present vol ume, based mostly on his own work, is a milestone in the devel opment of soft computing, integrating various disciplines from the fields of information science and engineering. The book consists of three parts, the first of which is devoted to probabilistic neural net works. Neural excitation is stochastic, so it is natural to investi gate the Bayesian properties of connectionist structures developed by Professor Rutkowski. This new approach has proven to be par ticularly useful for handling regression and classification problems vi Preface in time-varying environments. Throughout this book, major themes are selected from theoretical subjects that are tightly connected with challenging applications.

This volume provides a collection of sixteen articles containing review and new material. In a unified way, they describe the recent development of theories and methodologies in pattern recognition, image processing and vision using fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, rough sets and wavelets with significant real life applications. The book details the theory of granular computing and the role of a rough-neuro approach as a way of computing with words and designing intelligent recognition systems. It also demonstrates applications of the soft computing paradigm to case based reasoning, data mining and bio-informatics with a scope for future research. The contributors from around the world present a balanced mixture of current theory, algorithms and applications, making the book an extremely useful resource for students and researchers alike. Contents: Pattern Recognition: Multiple Classifier Systems; Building Decision Trees from the Fourier Spectrum of a Tree Ensemble; Clustering Large Data Sets; Multi-objective Variable String Genetic Classifier: Application to Remote Sensing Imagery; Image Processing and Vision: Dissimilarity Measures Between Fuzzy Sets or Fuzzy Structures; Early Vision: Concepts and Algorithms; Self-organizing Neural Network for Multi-level Image Segmentation; Geometric Transformation by Moment Method with Wavelet Matrix; New Computationally Efficient Algorithms for Video Coding; Soft Computing for Computational Media Aesthetics: Analyzing Video Content for Meaning; Granular Computing and Case Based Reasoning: Towards Granular Multi-agent Systems; Granular Computing and Pattern Recognition; Case Base Maintenance: A Soft Computing Perspective; Real Life Applications: Autoassociative Neural Network Models for Pattern Recognition Tasks in Speech and Image; Protein Structure Prediction Using Soft Computing; Pattern Classification for Biological Data Mining. Readership: Upper level undergraduates, graduates, researchers, academics and industrialists.

Pattern recognition (PR) consists of three important tasks: feature analysis, clustering and classification. Image analysis can also be viewed as a PR task. Feature analysis is a very important step in designing any useful PR system because its effectiveness depends heavily on the set of features used to realise the system.A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it deals with all three aspects of PR, namely feature analysis, clustering and classifier design. It also encompasses image processing methodologies and image retrieval with subjective information. The other interesting aspect of the volume is that it covers all three major facets of soft computing: fuzzy logic, neural networks and evolutionary computing.

Soft computing is playing an increasing role in the study of complex systems in science and engineering. There is a large spectrum of successful applications of soft computing in very different applications domains such as aerospace, communication, consumer appliances, electric power systems, process engineering, transportation, and manufacturing automation and robotics. It has taken a while to bring the early ideas of soft computing to an area and a discipline that seems to be more than appropriate for that. Here it is! This book studies SOFT computing in SOFTware engineering environment. The book is HARD in terms of its results. It covers a range of core topics from software engineering that are soft from its very nature: selection of components, software design, software reuse, software cost estimation and software processes. Soft computing differs from conventional (hard) computing in its ability to be tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. The guiding principle of soft computing is: Exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost. The role model for soft computing is the human mind. This seems to be a natural fit with software engineering, a human-based development activity based on sound engineering principles. A recent survey by researchers reveals that "Software Engineering research tends to be quite self-contained, not relying on other disciplines for its thinking".

The two-volume set LNAI 7894 and LNCS 7895 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2013, held in Zakopane, Poland in June 2013. The 112 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 274 submissions. The 57 papers included in the first volume are organized in the following topical sections: neural networks and their applications; fuzzy systems and their applications; pattern classification; and computer vision, image and speech analysis.

This book provides a new grade methodology for intelligent data analysis. It introduces a specific infrastructure of concepts needed to describe data analysis models and methods. This monograph is the only book presently available covering both the theory and application of grade data analysis and therefore aiming both at researchers, students, as well as applied practitioners. The text is richly illustrated through examples and case studies and includes a short introduction to software implementing grade methods, which can be downloaded from the editors.

This monograph presents selected areas of application of pattern recognition and classification approaches including handwriting recognition, medical image analysis and interpretation, development of cognitive systems for image computer understanding, moving object detection, advanced image filtration and intelligent multi-object labelling and classification. It is directed to the scientists, application engineers, professors, professors and students will find this book useful.

This volume presents new trends and developments in soft computing techniques. Topics include: neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, knowledge discovery, rough sets, and hybrid methods. It also covers various applications of soft computing techniques in economics, mechanics, medicine, automatics and image processing. The book contains contributions from internationally recognized scientists, such as Zadeh, Bubnicki, Pawlak, Amari, Batyrshin, Hirota, Koczy, Kosinski, Novák, S.-Y. Lee, Pedrycz, Raudys, Setiono, Sincak, Strumillo, Takagi, Usui, Wilamowski and Zurada. An excellent overview of soft computing methods and their applications.

Modern control systems are complex in the sense of implementing numerous functions, such as process variable processing, digital control, process monitoring and alarm indication, graphic visualization of process running, or data exchange with other systems or databases. This book conveys a description of the developed DiaSter system as well as characteristics of advanced original methods of modeling, knowledge discovery, simulator construction, process diagnosis, as well as predictive and supervision control applied in the system. The system allows early recognition of abnormal states of industrial processes along with faults or malfunctions of actuators as well as technological and measuring units. The universality of solutions implemented in DiaSter facilitates its broad application, for example, in the power, chemical, pharmaceutical, metallurgical and food industries. The system is a world-scale unique solution, and due to its open architecture it can be connected practically with any other control systems. The monograph presents theoretical and practical results of research into fault diagnosis and control conducted over many years within the cooperation of Polish research teams from the Warsaw University of Technology, the University of Zielona Góra, the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, and the Technical University of Rzeszów. The book will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students in automatic control, technical diagnostics and computer engineering, and to engineers tasked with the development of advanced control systems of complex industrial processes.