EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing Special Issue on Information mining from multimedia databases The main focus of this special issue is on information mining techniques for the extraction and interpretation of semantic contents in multimedia databases. Due to the spatiotemporal nature of most multimedia data streams, an important requirement for this information mining process is the accurate extraction and characterization of salient events from the original signal-based representation, and the discovery of possible relationships between these events in the form of high-level association rules. The availability of these high-level representations will play an important role in applications such as content-based multimedia information retrieval, surveillance, and automatic image/video annotation. For this problem, the main challenges are in the design and analysis of mapping techniques between the signal-level and semantic-level representations, and the adaptive characterization of the notion of saliency for multimedia events in view of its dependence on the preferences of individual users and specific contexts. In other words, the eventual objective is to bridge the gap between the low-level feature representation and the high-level interpretation of multimedia contents. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): o Mapping techniques between low-level features and high-level representations for bridging the semantic gap. o The application of machine learning techniques (e.g. symbol-based inductive learning, neural networks, and evolutionary computation) for multimedia information mining. o Detection, characterization, and representation of salient events in multimedia data streams. o Automatic discovery of high-level association rules in image and video mining. o Automatic image/video annotation, classification, and indexing. o Multimedia information mining based on the integration of multiple modalities such as text, image, video, and audio. o Adaptive characterization of users' preference in the interpretation of semantic information. o Multimedia data mining within the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 frameworks. o Applications of multimedia data mining in areas such as video scene analysis, content-based retrieval, multimedia content summarization, surveillance, scientific visualization, and medical imaging. 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 manuscript tracking system at http://www.mstracking.com/asp/, according to the following timetable. Manuscript Due September 1, 2004 Acceptance Notification January 1, 2005 Final Manuscript Due April 1, 2005 Publication Date 3rd Quarter, 2005 GUEST EDITORS: Ling Guan, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3; lguan@ee.ryerson.ca Horace H. S. Ip, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong; cship@cityu.edu.hk Paul H. Lewis, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK; phl@ecs.soton.ac.uk Hau-San Wong, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong; hswong@cityu.edu.hk Paisarn Muneesawang, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3; pmuneesa@ee.ryerson.ca