Journal of Real-Time Image Processing: fourth issue of volume 8

Abstract

The fourth issue of volume 8 completes another successful year of JRTIP publication by having received and reviewed a high volume of manuscript submissions. This trend exhibits a steady increase of real-time importance as related to image and video processing. Real-time image and video processing technologies demand co-designs of software with reduced complexity and their adaptation to appropriate hardware platforms which normally possess limited resources. JRTIP continues to be the only journal that is solely dedicated to the real-time aspects of image and video processing spanning a wide range of industrial and R&D applications. The special issues organized thus far have also greatly demonstrated the real-time focus of JRTIP through offering modern topics of interest to the real-time image and video processing community. The ongoing success of JRTIP is reflected by an increase in its 2012 impact factor to 1.156 (Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports 2012). Many have contributed to this increase. First and foremost, we would like to express our appreciation to the JRTIP dedicated team of associate editors for their handling of manuscripts. Our thanks extend to authors and reviewers for submitting manuscripts and for reviewing manuscripts, respectively. In addition, we wish to acknowledge our growing community of readers who have downloaded 25,000? JRTIP articles. Of course with success come challenges. One of the challenges has been coping with the increasing number of submitted manuscripts. To address this challenge, we invited the guest editors of the recent special issues as well as experienced researchers to join the editorial board. These colleagues have become familiar with the quality standards practiced by the journal, and the issues associated with its reviewing process through their successful offerings of special issues and other interactions with the journal. As a result, we are delighted to welcome the following colleagues to the JRTIP editorial board: Luis Alvarez, Daniel Chillet, Marco Diani, Michael Hubner, Bogdan Smolka, Leonel Sousa, and Juan Wachs. Another challenge accompanying the success of JRTIP has been the relatively long list of accepted manuscripts on Online First that are to appear in print format. To address this challenge, we are pleased to indicate that the number of pages will be increased from 320 to 640 pages per year. That is to say starting with volume 9 in 2014, on average, twice as many papers will appear in the four annual volumes of JRTIP. We are thankful to Springer for providing the required resources to double the number of print pages. Before providing an overview of papers appearing in this issue, it is worth reminding our readers of the upcoming SPIE Conference on Real-Time Image and Video Processing that is going to be held as part of the SPIE Photonics Europe in April 2014 in Brussels, Belgium. Similar to the previous years, the JRTIP editorial board will be meeting and discussing the status of the journal at this conference. The conference details are available at http://www.spie.org/epe115 and its call for papers appears as an appendix to this issue. This issue presents seven original research papers that reflect the real-time thrust of the journal indicating different ways real-time image and video processing can be achieved, where three papers address algorithmic real-time solutions and four papers address hardware real-time solutions. N. Kehtarnavaz (&) University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA e-mail: kehtar@utdallas.edu