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