Proceedings of the ACM 2nd international workshop on Video surveillance & sensor networks

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd ACM Workshop on Video Surveillance & Sensor Networks - VSSN'04. With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras (optical sensors) and non-optical (e.g., electrical, thermal, and biological) sensing devices, and the deployment of high-speed, wired/wireless networks, it has become economically and technically feasible to employ a large number of sensing devices for applications such as security surveillance, environment monitoring, and health care. In a sensor network, multiple sensors with or without spatially and temporally overlapping coverage generate signals. These signals need to be sampled, filtered, transmitted, processed, fused, stored, indexed, and then summarized as semantic events to allow efficient and effective queries and mining. This workshop brings together researchers, developers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss various issues involved in developing large-scale video and sensor networks. The workshop topics include tracking, event recognition, sensor-network management, and surveillance systems. The call for papers attracted submissions from Asia, Europe, and the United States. The program committee accepted 17 papers. In addition, the program includes two keynotes by Dr. Feng Zhao from Microsoft Research and Prof. Rainer Lienhart from University of Augsburg. Dr. Zhao addresses research issues in Sensor Networks; Prof. Lienhart presents research issues in Video Surveillance. We hope that these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and developers.