Special Issue on Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics - "Assistive Solutions for Mobility, Communication and HMI"

h 1 In the last decades, there has been a tremendous increase in deand for assistive technologies useful to overcome functional limtations of individuals and to improve their quality of life. Assistive echnologies provide a set of advanced tools that can improve the uality of life not only for impaired people, patients and elderly ut also for healthy people struggling with everyday actions. Reently, novel assistive tools have been successfully commercialised ringing the Computer Vision and Robotics research from theory o applications exploited by the society. After a period of slow but teady progress, this new scientific area is mature for new research nd application breakthroughs. This CVIU special issue gathers very recent and various works n assistive computer vision and robotics. We have received 121 apers of authors from different countries. The submissions went hrough an initial check by the guest editors for suitability to the cope of the special issue, and 54 submissions had to be rejected ithout review because they were considered out of scope. The emaining papers went then through the standard review process, ith up to three rounds of revisions for some papers. In the end, 1 papers were considered suitable for publication in this special ssue that is divided in two parts. Part I contains papers related o computer vision and machine learning issues such as motion nalysis, image segmentation and annotation, object recognition, xtreme learning, statistical classification, feature extraction, trackng, 3D morphometric analysis. Part II collects papers dealing with ome computer vision issues which have applications in robotics uch as multi-modal human-robot interaction, autonomous navigaion, object usage, place recognition, robotic manipulator, egocenric vision. We would like to thank here all the authors who submitted heir work to our special issue, and our reviewers who put their recious expertise and time in their reviews in a very profesional manner. We also wish to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Professor ikos Paragios and the editorial staff at the Computer Vision and mage Understanding Journal who have guided and supported us hroughout the process of producing this special issue. In the following, we briefly describe the papers related to the art II of the CVIU special issue on Assistive Computer Vision and obotics. The paper “Localization and Tracking in Known Large Environents using Portable Real-time 3D Sensors” by Sanchez et al. prooses a framework that uses a single portable 3D sensor to solve he place recognition problem and continuously tracks its position