Guest editorial: Advances in multimedia surveillance

Abstract

Automated multimedia surveillance systems capture, process and analyze multimedia data coming from heterogeneous sensors. These systems are often designed to support (semi-) automatic decision making, such as generating an alarm in response to a surveillance event, as well as providing useful information to human decision makers to ensure public safety. Various tools and techniques from different fields such as Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Multimedia Computing have contributed to the success of such systems. Although there has been significant progress in the field of multimedia surveillance research, we still face situations when the system is unable to detect critical events, wrongly identifies individuals or generates false alarms leading to undesired consequences. Hence, the goal of this special issue is to bring forward recent advancements in automated multimedia surveillance for improved public safety. More specifically, it reports the state-of-the-art techniques, methodologies and systems for automatic surveillance aiming to protect people and ensure their safety. An open call for papers attracted 16 submissions addressing different aspects of multimedia surveillance systems. After a thorough and highly competitive review process, the guest editorial committee recommended the acceptance of 11 top quality papers, though most submissions were of high quality. The accepted papers