Pattern Recognition 30th DAGM Symposium Munich, Germany, June 10-13, 2008 Proceedings

This year, 2008, we had a very special Annual Symposium of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur ¨ Mustererkennung (DAGM) in Munich, and there are several reasons for that. First ofall, this yearwasthe 30th anniversaryof the symposium. Thismeans that the ?rst symposium was organized in 1978 and the location of this event was:Munich!Justtwoyearsbefore,in1976,theDAGMwasfoundedin:Munich! And Munich was also the location of two further DAGM symposia, in 1991 and in 2001. When I attended the conference in 2001, I was in negotiations for my appointmentto the Chair ofHuman–MachineCommunicationatthe Technische Universit¨ atMunc ¨ hen(TUM)andcertainlyIdidnotatallanticipatethatIwould have the pleasure and honor to host this conference just seven years later again in Munich for its 30th anniversary. But special dates are not the only reason why DAGM was somewhat di?- ent this time. This year, DAGM was organized in conjunction with Automatica, the Third International Trade Fair for Automation in Assembly, Robotics, and Vision, one of the world's leading fairs in automation and robotics. This was an ideal platform for the exchange of ideas and people between the symposium and the fair, and the conference thus took place in a somewhat unusual but extra- dinary location, the International Congress Center (ICM), in the direct vicinity of the New Munich Trade Fair Center, the location of the Automatica fair. With free access to Automatica, the registrants of DAGM got the opportunity to make full use of all the synergy e?ects associated with this special arrangement.