Preface

The research on computer vision systems has been increasing every day and has led to the design of multiple types of these systems with innumerous applications in our daily life. The recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), together with the huge amount of digital visual data available, have boosted vision system performance in several ways. Computer systems with digital cameras using the most recent AI techniques are intelligent to perceive and understand the visual world. However, there are still several open challenges in using computer vision at the level of the human eye, despite the existence of several systems that outperform humans in several specific tasks.

Information extraction and visual object tracking are essential tasks in computer vision with a huge number of real-world applications including intelligent management of Web videos, events and object detection, human-computer interaction, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, robotics, sports, video indexing and retrieval, and surveillance and security, among many others. The goal of information extraction is to efficiently extract useful data from the images recorded over time in the form of digital videos. Visual object tracking aims to estimate an unknown visual trajectory of a target when an initial position is given in a video frame. The exponential effort in the development of new algorithms for information extraction and visual object tracking in digital videos is confirmed by the amount of money invested in scientific projects and in the quantity and quality of the manuscripts published in a considerable number of journals and conferences worldwide on these topics.

This book is a result of research done by several researchers and professionals who have highly contributed to the field of image processing. The main goal is to present recent advances in this hot topic. I would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions.

This book contains eight chapters divided into three sections. Section 1 consists of four chapters focusing on the visual tracking problem. Section 2 includes three chapters focusing on information extraction from images. Section 3 includes one chapter on new advances in image sensors.

I hope that readers of this book will find it interesting and informative, considering it a good tool for their research or projects.

> **António José Ribeiro Neves, Ph.D.** Professor, Department of Electronics, Telecommunications, and Informatics, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

> > **Francisco Javier Gallegos-Funes, Ph.D.** Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico
