th This two-volume set constitutes the Proceedings of the 16 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2009), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 1-5, 2009. ICONIP is a world-renowned international conference that is held annually in the Asia-Pacific region. This prestigious event is sponsored by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA), and it has provided an annual forum for international researchers to exchange the latest ideas and advances in neural networks and related discipline. The School of Information Technology (SIT) at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), Bangkok, Thailand was the proud host of ICONIP 2009. The conference theme was "Challenges and Trends of Neural Information Processing," with an aim to discuss the past, present, and future challenges and trends in the field of neural information processing. ICONIP 2009 accepted 145 regular session papers and 53 special session papers from a total of 466 submissions received on the Springer Online Conference Service (OCS) system. The authors of accepted papers alone covered 36 countries and - gions worldwide and there are over 500 authors in these proceedings. The technical sessions were divided into 23 topical categories, including 9 special sessions.
