Special Issue on Animal and Insect Behavior Understanding in Image Sequences Springer - EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing

http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/sites/10235/pdf/H9111_A4_2.pdf

Deadline for submissions: January 15th, 2013

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This special issue aims at reporting on the most recent approaches and tools for the identification, interpretation and description of animal and insect behaviour in image sequences. It specially focuses 
on the interactions between (i) computer vision theories and methods, (ii) artificial intelligence techniques for the high-level analysis of animal and insect behaviours and (iii) multimedia semantics methods for indexing and retrieval of animal and insect behaviour detected in images and videos.

With the widespread use of video imaging devices, the study of the behaviour by exploiting visual data has become very popular. The visual information gathered from image sequences is extremely useful to understand the behaviour of the different objects in the scene, as well as how they interact each other or with the surrounding environment. However, whilst a large number of video analysis techniques have been developed specifically for investigating events and behaviours in human-centered applications, very little attention 
has been paid to the understanding of other live organisms, such as animals and insects, although huge amount of video data are continuously recorded; e.g. the EcoGrid project or the wide range of nest cams continuously monitor, respectively, underwater reef and birds nests (there exist also variants focusing on wolves, badgers, 
foxes etc.). Moreover, the few existing approaches deal only with controlled environments (e.g. labs, cages, etc.)and as such they cannot be used in real-life applications. 

The automated analysis of video data in real-life environments poses several challenges for computer vision researchers because of the uncontrolled scene conditions and the nature of the targets to be analysed whose 3D motion tends to be erratic, with sudden direction and speed variations, and appearance and non-rigid shape 
can undergo quick changes. Computer Vision tools able to analyse those complex environments are of great interest to biologists in their striving towards analyzing the natural environment, promoting its preservation, and understanding the behaviour and interactions of the living organisms (in- sects, animals, etc.) that are 
part of it. 

We invite authors to contribute high quality papers that will stimulate the research community on the use image and video analysis methods to be applied in real-life environments for animal and insect behaviour monitoring and understanding. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- Living organism detection, tracking, classification and recognition in image sequences
- Animals and Insects dynamic shape analysis
- Visual surveillance and Event Detection in Ecological Applications
- Stereo Vision and Structure from motion of living organisms
- Event and Activity Recognition in Ecological Videostreams
- Animal and insect behaviour analysis and articulated models
- Animal and insect motion and trajectory analysis
- High-level behaviour recognition and understanding
- Semantic Region Identification in animal and insect populated scenarios
- Categorization and Natural Scene Understanding
- Natural Scene and Object-Scene Interaction Understanding
- Ontologies and semantic annotation of animal and insect motion in video content


Submission Instructions

Submissions to the special issue must include new, unpublished, original research. 
Papers must be original and have not been published or submitted elsewhere. All 
papers must be written in English. The submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind 
procedure by at least three reviewers. The papers must contain no information identifying 
the author(s) or their organization(s).

Before submission authors should carefully read over the Instructions for Authors, which are located at
jivp.eurasipjournals.com/authors/instructions. 

Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the SpringerOpen 
submission system at jivp.eurasipjournals.com/manuscript according to the submission schedule. 

They should choose the correct Special Issue in the 'sections' box upon submitting. In addition, they should 
specify the manuscript as a submission to the 'Special Issue on Animal and Insect Behaviour Understanding in 
Image Sequences' in the cover letter. All submissions will undergo initial screening by the Editors for 
fit to the theme of the Special Issue and prospects for successfully negotiating the review process.


Important Dates

15 Jan 2013:      Manuscript submission due
15 April 2013:    Acceptance/Revision notification
30 May 2013:      Revised manuscript due
30 July 2013:     Final acceptance notication 
15 August 2013:   Final manuscript due: 
September 2013:   Tentative publication