Introduction to the special issue on video object processing for surveillance applications

Video-based surveillance (or video surveillance) is one of the fastest growing sectors in the security market. This is due to the high amount of useful information that can be extracted from a video sequence. In particular, the automatic real-time processing of video objects, i.e., the extraction of video objects and related high-level content, is hereby of paramount importance. High-level video content, e.g., object activities and events, are generally related to the movement of video objects. This is related to the human visual system (HVS) which is strongly attracted to moving objects creating luminance change [Nothdurft (1993); Franconeri and Simons (2003); Abrams and Christ (2003)].