Editorial IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Special Section on Video Analytics: Challenges, Algorithms, and Applications
The papers in this special section focus on the topic of video analytics. Also known as video content analysis, video analytics refer to the capability of automatically analyzing video to extract knowledge/information and detect and determine temporal and spatial events. The algorithms designed for these analytics can be implemented as software on general-purpose machines, or as hardware in specialized video processing units. Video analytics is still an emerging technology with techniques that are continuously being developed to help make widespread implementation feasible in the years ahead. Such analytics has been typically used in semantic categorization and retrieval of video databases. A goal of this special issue is to focus on video analytics beyond categorization and retrieval. With increasing hardware capability and advances in algorithms used, real-time video analytics is now being used in a wide range of domains including entertainment, health-care, retail, automotive, transport, home automation, emotion analysis, aesthetics, inappropriate content detection, safety and security. For instance, video analytics are increasingly being deployed for real-time alerts in situation monitoring systems such as traffic surveillance (vehicle counting), counting people in lines (some hospitals are using this to get more nurses from a less busy department to serve thewaiting patients) and in manufacturing (for monitoring and counting). From the sensing aspect, 3-D cameras such as RGB-D and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) cameras are becoming more and more affordable, enabling additional areas of research and applications, such as self-driving cars employing video analytics on LiDAR captured data for path planning as well as obstacle detection.