EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing Special Issue on Visual Sensor Networks Call for Papers Research into the design, development, and deployment of networked sensing devices for high-level inference and surveillance of the physical environment has grown tremendously in the last few years. This trend has been motivated, in part, by recent technological advances in electronics, communication networking, and signal processing. Sensor networks are commonly comprised of lightweight distributed sensor nodes such as low-cost video cameras. There is inherent redundancy in the number of nodes deployed and corresponding networking topology. Operation of the network requires autonomous peer-based collaboration amongst the nodes and intermediate data-centric processing amongst local sensors. The intermediate processing known as in-network processing is application-specific. Often, the sensors are untethered so that they must communicate wirelessly and be battery-powered. Initial focus was placed on the design of sensor networks in which scalar phenomena such as temperature, pressure, or humidity were measured. It is envisioned that much societal use of sensor networks will also be based on employing content-rich vision-based sensors. The volume of data collected as well as the sophistication of the necessary in-network stream content processing provide a diverse set of challenges in comparison with generic scalar sensor network research. Applications that will be facilitated through the development of visual sensor networking technology include automatic tracking, monitoring and signaling of intruders within a physical area, assisted living for the elderly or physically disabled, environmental monitoring, and command and control of unmanned vehicles. Many current video-based surveillance systems have centralized architectures that collect all visual data at a central location for storage or real-time interpretation by a human operator. The use of distributed processing for automated event detection would significantly alleviate mundane or time-critical activities performed by human operators, and provide better network scalability. Thus, it is expected that video surveillance solutions of the future will successfully utilize visual sensor networking technologies. Given that the field of visual sensor networking is still in its infancy, it is critical that researchers from the diverse disciplines including signal processing, communications, and electronics address the many challenges of this emerging field. This special issue aims to bring together a diverse set of research results that are essential for the development of robust and practical visual sensor networks. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): o Sensor network architectures for high-bandwidth vision applications o Communication networking protocols specific to visual sensor networks o Scalability, reliability, and modeling issues of visual sensor networks o Distributed computer vision and aggregation algorithms for low-power surveillance applications o Fusion of information from visual and other modalities of sensors o Storage and retrieval of sensor information o Security issues for visual sensor networks o Visual sensor network testbed research o Novel applications of visual sensor networks o Design of visual sensors Authors should follow the EURASIP JASP manuscript format described at the journal site http://www.hindawi.info/asp/ . Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the EURASIP JASP's manuscript tracking system at journal's web site, according to the following timetable. Manuscript Due December 1, 2005 Acceptance Notification April 1, 2006 Final Manuscript Due July 1, 2006 Publication Date 3rd Quarter, 2006 GUEST EDITORS: Deepa Kundur, Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA; deepa@ee.tamu.edu Ching-Yung Lin, Distributed Computing Department, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, USA; chingyung@us.ibm.com Chun Shien Lu, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; lcs@iis.sinica.edu.tw