ACADEMIA

NCSA researcher Peter Bajcsy and colleagues Thomas Haenselmann (University of Mannheim, Germany) and Shao-Yi Chien (National Taiwan University) will guest edit a special issue of the journal ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications that will focus on multimedia sensor fusion and will be published in fall 2010.

Today's devices—like cell phones, laptops, sensor nodes and even automobiles—can capture many quantities, like temperature, tilt and yaw, audio, video, GPS coordinates or the proximity of WLAN base stations and Bluetooth devices. They are true multimedia devices that go beyond mere audio and video capturing. The joint consideration of all of these modalities comprises new possibilities for multimedia research.

The joint analysis of measurements is often referred to as sensor fusion. The strength of analyzing data from different domains and/or multiple sensors lies in its ability:

• to find out facts which are not easy to see by analyzing a single domain only, and
• to cope with fuzzy information and noise.

Taking different domains into account opens up the possibility of finding hidden information. For example, a small silhouette of a person may not reveal whether the back or the front is facing the camera. However, the additional usage of a passive IR movement sensor allows the direction of movement to be derived reliably. Another example is the use of multiple cameras, jointly focusing on an object. While the view of each single camera might be blurred by bushes, fog or other obstacles, an image reconstructed from multiple cameras with slightly differing locations can result in a clear picture of the object. With a vast variety of measurements from ubiquitous devices, there is a yet unexploited potential for deriving high-level semantics from existing sensor readings.

In this special issue, surveys and original work on the joint analysis of multiple sensors should be addressed. These may be (but are not limited to)

• movement, acceleration, vibration or the tilt of a device
• data from force feedback devices, pulse clocks, etc.
• temperature, humidity and brightness
• the presence of other wireless mobile devices or base stations
• information from ZigBee appliances
• images from multiple or self-propelled cameras
• images from camera arrays and infrared cameras

Submissions are due by Dec. 14 via ACM Manuscript Central. Guidelines for submission preparation are available at http://tomccap.acm.org/. Clearly indicate in the cover-letter field that you are submitting for the special issue 2010.