******************************************************************************** Special Session on Low-Level Color Image Processing held in conjunction with the 16 International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2011) September 14-16, 2011, Ravenna, Italy http://avires.dimi.uniud.it/iciap2011/ ******************************************************************************** INTRODUCTION Color perception plays an important role in object recognition and scene understanding both for humans and intelligent vision systems. Recent advances in digital color imaging and computer hardware technology have led to an explosion in the use of color images in a variety of applications including medical imaging, content-based image retrieval, biometrics, watermarking, digital inpainting, remote sensing, visual quality inspection, among many others. As a result, automated processing and analysis of color images has become an active area of research, which is witnessed by the large number of publications during the past two decades. The multivariate nature of color image data presents new challenges for researchers and practitioners as the numerous methods developed for single channel images are often not directly applicable to multichannel images. The goal of this special session is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the area of Color Image Processing. We are soliciting original contributions, which address a wide range of theoretical and practical issues related to the early stages of the color image processing pipeline including, but not limited to: * Color Image Coding and Compression * Color Image Quantization and Halftoning * Color Image Filtering and Enhancement * Color Morphology * Color Edge Detection * Color Image Segmentation * Digital Camera Image Processing (Demosaicking, Zooming, Postprocessing, etc.) * Multispectral Image Processing * Applications and Future Trends PAPER SUBMISSION Prospective authors are invited to submit papers of no more than 10 pages including results, figures and references. In submitting a manuscript to ICIAP 2011, the authors acknowledge that no paper substantially similar in content has been or will be submitted to another conference during the ICIAP 2011 review period. All papers, regardless to whether accepted as orals or posters, will appear in the symposium proceedings, which will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. IMPORTANT DATES * Submission of full-length papers: March 15, 2011 * Notification of acceptance: May 14, 2011 * Submission of camera-ready papers: May 31, 2011 SPECIAL SESSION ORGANIZERS * M. Emre Celebi, Louisiana State University, Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, ecelebi@lsus.edu * Bogdan Smolka, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland, bogdan.smolka@polsl.pl * Gerald Schaefer, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, g.schaefer@lboro.ac.uk * Raimondo Schettini, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milan, Italy, schettini@disco.unimib.it