Special issue on IAPR MVA2013 best papers

With a number of successful deployments of various applications enabled bymachine vision technologies in recent years, there is an increasing demand for machine vision applications to provide a key solution for emerging issues, with high impact on industry, society, and our everyday lives. In particular, machine vision applications are expected to play a fundamental role in solving important problems in safety, security, environmental, and industrial issues on a global scale. With the proliferation of camera networks consisting of low-cost/high-performance image sensors, and recent increases in computational power, the basic infrastructure is now readily available to support smart systems for various applications such as factory automation, surveillance, intelligent transport systems, and sensor networks for environmental monitoring. Our current challenge is to develop keymachine vision technologies and systemswhich canmeet practical solutions of such applications. The 13th IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications, MVA2013, was held fromMay 20 through 23, 2013 at the Suzaku Campus, Ritsumeikan University, co-sponsored