COST 292 Special Session

COST is one of the longest‐running instruments funded by the EU RTD Framework Program. The members of the COST 292 action (see: http://www.cost292.org/) have a long tradition of involvement in WIAMIS, dating back to the establishment of this event. Since 2005, the action has been invited to organize a special session and this tradition was continued for WIAMIS 2008. This year, the special session focused on a subset of the broad research remit of the action. Specifically, the session targets research in the field of automated visual surveillance. This focus reflects a growing interest within COST 292 participants in this increasingly important area. The goal of this special session is to help bring together researchers working on this topic, both within COST 292 and beyond, with a view to stimulating future collaborative research in this area. The widely circulated call for papers targeted submissions on a broad range of topics covered by the above mentioned focus, including visual computation, event and activity modeling and analysis, multiple stream analysis, architectures, indexing and storage, coding and applications. All papers were peer reviewed by at least three reviewers drawn from a combination of the WIAMIS Technical Program Committee and a special Program Subcommittee set up specifically for this special session. Acceptance criteria considered overall quality as well as relevance to the topics of the special session. In the end, just 5 papers were accepted for oral presentation. The accepted papers address scene modeling, event detection, object recognition (human and non‐human) and fusion of multiple complementary data sources.