Special Issue on

The Coming of Ubiquitous Visual Computing


CALL FOR PAPERS


Visual perception is a critical human capability that allows us to sense and interact with the surrounding world and with each other. Visual perception consists of twomajor parts: sensing and understanding. In a visual computing machine system, these correspond to sensors for capturing images, and computational power for analysizing (low level) and interpreting (high level) the images. Mimicking the visual perception of human using a machine has been one of the central tasks for many disciplines and has been shown to be challenging partly due to the limitations of sensors and available computational power.

With recent advances of small CMOS sensors, driven mostly by the mobile phone industry, we see an era of sensors that rival human eyes in terms of resolution. As for computational power, we see processors running over 1GHz on small consumer devices. In particular, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has become so powerful and programmable that applications far beyond graphics utilize these GPUs.We have also seen visual computing systems that exploit computation and sensing jointly, much like a human perception system. The revolution in hardware not only provides accelerated computation for many traditional visual computing tasks, but also enables new applications. For example, with an array of inexpensive and small sensors (CMOS imager, GPS, 3D accelerometers), handheld devices are beginning to move beyond simple locationbased navigation, to Augmented Reality (AR) applications that mix real life images with synthesized graphics to enrich human visual experiences.

All these suggest that ubiquitous visual computing is coming and will have significant impact upon our society. This special issue will focus both on novel and innovative applications and on fundamental theoretical principles and limits of ubiquitous visual computing. Original highquality papers, including review articles, are solicited. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:


Authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/ according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due

August 15, 2011

First Round of Reviews

November 15, 2011

Publication Date

February 15, 2012



Lead Guest Editor:

Wenyi Zhao, Intuitive Surgical Inc., Sunnyvale, CA 94086-5304, USA; wyzhao@ieee.org


Guest Editors:

Radek Grzeszczuk, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA; radek.grzeszczuk@intel.com

Ashok Veeraraghavan, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University MS-380, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005 USA; veerarag@merl.com

Ruigang Yang, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506 USA; ryang@cs.uky.edu