Special Issue on

Facial Image Processing and Analysis

Face recognition systems are progressively becoming popular as means of extracting biometric information. Face recognition has a critical role in biometric systems and is attractive for numerous applications including visual surveillance and security. Because of the general public acceptance of face images on various documents, face recognition has a great potential to become the next generation biometric technology of choice. Face images are also the only biometric information available in some legacy databases and international terrorist watch-lists and can be acquired even without subjects' cooperation.

Though there has been a great deal of progress in face detection and recognition in the last few years, many problems remain unsolved. Research on face detection must confront with many challenging problems, especially when dealing with outdoor illumination, pose variation with large rotation angles, low image quality, low resolution, occlusion, and background changes in complex real-life scenes. The design of face recognition algorithms that are effective over a wide range of viewpoints, complex outdoor lighting, occlusions, facial expressions, and aging of subjects, is still a major area of research. Before one claims that the facial image processing / analysis system is reliable, rigorous testing and verification on real-world datasets must be performed, including databases for face analysis and tracking in digital video. 3D head model assisted recognition is another research area where new solutions are urgently needed to enhance robustness of today's recognition systems and enable real-time, face-oriented processing and analysis of visual data. Thus, vigorous research is needed to solve such outstanding challenging problems and propose advanced solutions and systems for emerging applications of facial image processing and analysis.

This special issue is particularly interested in recent progress in face detection and recognition that explores emerging themes such as digital video, 3D, near infrared, occlusion and disguise, long-term aging, and/or the lack of sufficient training data. Submitted articles must not have been previously published and must not be currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

New sensors or data sources
	3D-based face recognition Near infrared imaging for face recognition Video-based face recognition
Preprocessing
	Image preprocessing for face detection / recognition Color-based facial image processing and analysis De-blurring and super-resolution for robust face detection / recognition
Face and feature detection
	Face detection for best-shot selection Facial feature detection and extraction 3D head modeling and face tracking
Methods
	Subspace / kernel methods for face recognition Non-linear methods for face modeling Bionic face representation Ensemble learning for face classification
Key problems
	Outdoor illumination Large pose variations Mid-term and long-term aging Occlusion and disguise Low quality and low resolution Generalization problem due to lack of enough training examples
Dataset and evaluation
	Challenging datasets Video-based datasets Statistical performance evaluation
Applications and other topics
	Facial gesture recognition Real-time processing solutions and systems Face-based surveillance, biometrics, and multimedia applications Face recognition in compressed domain

Submission procedure:

Manuscript should conform to the standard guidelines of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI). Instructions for formatting papers can be found in the Guidelines for Contributors. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript via IJPRAI online submission system by December 1, 2007. "Facial Image Processing and Analysis" special issue should be indicated in the corresponding cover letter. All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers.

Important Dates:
Manuscript submission deadline: First notification: Revised manuscript submission: Notification of final decision: Final manuscript due: Publication of special issue:	December 1, 2007 March 15, 2008 (postponed: March 31, 2008) June 30, 2008 September 15, 2008 November 1, 2008 1st Quarter 2009

Guest Editors:
Mislav Grgic University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia	Shiguang Shan Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China	Rastislav Lukac Epson Canada Ltd. Toronto, ON, Canada

Please download IJPRAI Special Issue Call for Papers:

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