Preface

Due to the rise of technological devices and smartphones, the visualization of multimedia content has become a routine. Every day, a large number of images or videos can be viewed and/or sent, which are already part of our daily lives. This does not go unnoticed for techno‐ logical advances, where the researchers focus their efforts to turn that multimedia content into something more. Extracting information from videos and images can be very useful, since you can automatically get more information from the simple visualization.

In fields with security, medicine, and communication of humans, new and advanced techni‐ ques can be applied to facilitate or give more information to multimedia contents. A great number of tools are being developed in this sense, and in this book, works of high quality are presented, developed on a scientific methodology, giving validation to the present pro‐ posals. They have focused on motion tracking and gesture recognition. Therefore, it will be a very attractive reading for the reader.

*Motion Tracking and Gesture Recognition* is composed of seven chapters, which have been div‐ ided into two sections, motion tracking and gesture recognition. The section "Motion Track‐ ing" has four chapters. Motion tracking is observed by a hand-tracking system for surgical training, an approach based on detection of dangerous situation by the prediction of moving objects, an approach based on human motion detection results and preliminary environ‐ mental information to build a long-term context model to describe and predict human activ‐ ities, and a review about multispeaker tracking on different modalities. The section "Gesture Recognition" has three chapters. Gesture recognition is shown by a gait recognition ap‐ proach using Kinect sensor, a study of different methodologies for studying gesture recogni‐ tion on depth images, and a review about human action recognition and the details about a particular technique based on a sensor of visible range and with depth information.

As an editor of this book, I would like to thank the authors, their effort, and dedication that they have made to achieve some works of great quality. The sum of this effort has produced this book, which has become an inescapable read for all those who want to know the latest advances in tracking video and gesture recognition.

> **Carlos M. Travieso-González** University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

**Section 1**
