EURASIP JOURNAL ON APPLIED SIGNAL PROCESSING Special issue on OBJECT-BASED AND SEMANTIC IMAGE AND VIDEO ANALYSIS Recent progress and prospects in cognitive vision, multimedia, human-computer interaction, communications and the Web call for and can benefit from applications of advanced image and video analysis technologies. Adaptive robust systems are required for analysis, indexing and summarisation of large amounts of audio-visual data. Advanced image analysis technologies are needed for next-generation description and browsing services characterised by structured, object-based representations and personalised information access. Automatic extraction of semantic information from still or moving images and the analysis of their content is necessary for automatic annotation, indexing and categorisation. The aim of this special issue is to bring together contributions from the latest developments in the field of object-oriented and semantic image and video analysis applications. Prospective papers should be unpublished and present solid research work offering innovative contributions either from a theoretical or an applications point of view. Papers are invited from, but not limited to, the following topics: - Image multicue or multiscale segmentation and fusion - Video multicue or multirate segmentation and fusion - Segment/object tracking, categorization and recognition - High-level feature extraction and semantic analysis for image retrieval - Image and Video summarization and browsing - User- and context-based adaptive analysis Authors should follow the EURASIP JASP manuscript format described at the Journal site: http://asp.hindawi.com/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the EURASIP JASP's web submission system at http://asp.hindawi.com/wss, according to the following timetable. Manuscript due: December 20, 2002 Acceptance notification: June 30, 2003 Final manuscript due: August 31, 2003 Publication date: 1st quarter, 2004 GUEST EDITORS: Kiyoharu Aizawa, Department of Frontier Informatics, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan; aizawa@hal.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp Thomas Huang, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; huang@ifp.uiuc.edu Stefanos Kollias, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, 15773, Greece; stefanos@cs.ntua.gr Petros Maragos, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou, 15773, Greece; petros.maragos@cs.ntua.gr Ralf Schaefer, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut fur Nachrichtentechnik Berlin GmbH, Einsteinufer 37, 10587, Berlin, Germany; schaefer@hhi.de EDITORIAL BOARD REPRESENTATIVE: Ferran Marques, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain