Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2005, held in Lake Tahoe, NV, USA in December 2005.The 33 revised full papers and 26 poster papers presented together with 5 keynote presentations and 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. The papers are rounded off by 32 presentations held at seven special tracks. The papers cover the four main areas of visual computing: vision, graphics, visualization, and virtual reality. The topics addressed are computer graphics, medical imaging, computer vision methods for ambient intelligence, virtual reality and medicine, pattern analysis and recognition applications in biometrics, visualization, mediated reality, visual surveillance in challenging environments, low level vision, encoding and compression, segmentation, recognition and reconstruction, motion, text extraction and retrieval, intelligent vehicles and autonomous navigation, and visualization techniques in geophysical science.