Special issue on multimedia Surveillance systems: guest editorial

Abstract

It is with considerable pride that we present this special issue of ACM multimedia based on the presentations at the third Video Surveillance and Sensor Network workshop, in conjunction with the ACM conference in Singapore 2005. The papers were thoroughly reviewed independently of the review process for the workshop. This special issue consists of eight papers drawn from a number of areas. It appears that we are breaking new ground as explained in this issue. Whenever we say multimedia, we think of systems and services that manage heterogeneous data for human-oriented applications; human users are normally the subjects who access and use multimedia data, multimedia streams, multimedia content, and multimedia interfaces in many different applications contexts. Following this abstraction, multimedia surveillance systems would be only a surveillance system able to produce output of the task in a multimedia format, providing distilled video, images and sounds of the monitored environment, which would possibly be annotated in an efficient and standard way or possibly transcoded in another media such as text or animation, to improve further querying to surveillance stored data. Instead, the idea of multimedia surveillance systems must be enlarged. It is not only a system capable of