Guest Editorial: Analysis and Retrieval of Events/Actions and Workflows in Video Streams

Cognitive video supervision and event analysis in video sequences is a critical task in many multimedia applications. Methods, tools, and algorithms that aim to detect and recognize high-level concepts and their respective spatiotemporal and causal relations in order to identify semantic video activities, actions, and procedures have been in the focus of the research community over the last years. This research area has strong impact on many real-life applications such as service quality assurance, compliance to the designed procedures in industrial plants, surveillance of people-dense areas (e.g., thematic parks, critical public infrastructures), crisis management in public service areas (e.g., train stations, airports), security (detection of abnormal behaviors in surveillance videos), semantic characterization, and annotation of video streams in various domains (e.g., broadcast or user-generated videos).