======================================= International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence Special Issue on Video Analysis and Understanding for Surveillance Applications International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence is seeking original high-quality manuscripts for a Special Issue on Video Analysis and Understanding for Surveillance Applications, scheduled for publication in 2009. With the ubiquitous presence of low-cost cameras, video-based smart surveillance has been one of the most popular topics in the computer vision, pattern recognition and image understanding communities. The significance of this research is strongly driven by the immediate demands of real-world security monitoring systems for commercial, industrial and military applications. Visual surveillance has played a leading role in reducing the personal and financial costs of preventing crimes and terrorism, while automatic video understanding enables intelligent, real-time, and precise solution to smart surveillance systems. In recent years, video analysis and understanding has been featured in leading international journals and conferences. Although there has been great progress over past few years, there are a number of significant challenges involving the understanding, designing, building, and evaluating the complex video analysis systems. These challenges include robust segmentation and tracking objects in complex scenes, the ability to characterize a threat event, semantic linkage between camera networks and other sensors, unconstrained activity recognition and behavioural profiling, view-invariance of motion features, abnormal event detection, etc. Therefore, more advanced solutions to these challenging problems need to be exploited for meeting emerging application needs. This special issue is particularly interested in new advances in video analysis and understanding techniques for surveillance applications. We are soliciting original contributions of researchers and practitioners from academia as well as industry, which address a wide range of theoretical and application issues. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: o Background and environment modelling o Moving object segmentation and classification o Tracking of object motion and interaction o Motion feature extraction and representation o Activity modelling and recognition o Behaviour analysis and understanding o Abnormal event detection and recognition o Video-based biometric identification o Extraction of semantics from video o Perception and modelling of user and context o Surveillance video annotation and searching o Wide area surveillance o Camera networks and data fusion o Visual system design and performance evaluation o Other related aspects Submission procedure: Manuscript should conform to the standard guidelines of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI). Instructions for formatting papers can be found in the Guidelines for Contributors. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript via IJPRAI online submission system by Jun 1, 2008. The submissions must not have been previously published and must not be currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Important Dates: o Full manuscript submission due: Jun. 1, 2008 o First notification: Sep. 1, 2008 o Revised manuscript submission due: Nov. 1, 2008 o Notification of final decision: Dec. 1, 2009 o Final manuscript submission due: Jan. 1, 2009 o Publication of special issue: 2nd or 3rd Quarter 2009 Guest Editors Dr. Liang Wang (lwwang@csse.unimelb.edu.au) The University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Qiang Wu (wuq@it.uts.edu.au) University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Dr. Ming Li (ming@deakin.edu.au) Deakin University, Australia. Dr. Jordi Gonzālez (poal@cvc.uab.es) Institut de Robōtica i Informātica Industrial (UPC-CSIC), Barcelona 08028, Catalonia, Spain Dr. Xin Geng (xge@deakin.edu.au) Deakin University, Australia. =======================================