Pattern Recognition is the official journal of the Pattern Recognition Society. The Society was formed to fill a need for information exchange among research workers in the pattern recognition field. Up to now, we ''pattern-recognitionophiles'' have been tagging along in computer science, information theory, optical processing techniques, and other miscellaneous fields. Because this work in pattern recognition presently appears in widely spread articles and as isolated lectures in conferences in many diverse areas, the purpose of the journal Pattern Recognition is to give all of us an opportunity to get together in one place to publish our work. The journal will thereby expedite communication among research scientists interested in pattern recognition.

We consider pattern recognition in the broad sense, and we assume that the journal will be read by people with a common interest in pattern recognition but from many diverse backgrounds. These include biometrics, target recognition, biological taxonomy, meteorology, space science, classification methods, character recognition, image processing, industrial applications, neural computing, and many others.

The publication policy is to publish (1) new original articles that have been appropriately reviewed by competent scientific people, (2) reviews of developments in the field, and (3) pedagogical papers covering specific areas of interest in pattern recognition. Various special issues will be organized from time to time on current topics of interest to Pattern Recognition.

Special Issue on Meta-learning for Image/Video Segmentation
Submission Date: 2020-11-15

Pattern recognition (PR) is in transition as the fast convergence of digital technologies and data science holds the promise to liberate consumer data and provide a faster and more cost-effective way of improving human initiatives. Particularly, deep learning, as one of the automatic discovery methods of regularities in data, is heavily influencing in the computer vision applications, including image segmentation, object tracking and recognition. The data driven-based deep learning algorithms have the potential to reshape the expectations of human’s actions, the way that companies’ stakeholders collaborate, and revamp business models in the various industries.

However, most of recent big data driven-based deep learning algorithms remain challenging to discover patterns in small data, which are insufficient to train deep networks.

To tackle these challenges, meta-learning is a recent technique to entail acquiring a prior over previous tasks and experiences, such that new tasks be learned from small amounts of data. It aims at using machine learning itself to automatically learn the most appropriate algorithms and parameters for deep learning algorithms. Particularly, meta-learning approaches that utilize neural network representations have made progress in few-shot image classification, reinforcement learning, and, more recently, image semantic segmentation, the training algorithms and model architectures have become increasingly specialized to the few-shot domain.

The objective of this special issue is to generate a comprehensive understanding of meta-learning in image/video segmentation for both theoretical and practical implications. This special issue is focused on the scope from responsible small data augmentation, meta-learning engine, to meta-learning applications. Authors are invited to submit outstanding and original unpublished research manuscripts focused on the latest findings in this field.

The following (but not limited to) topics are the particular interests of this special issue, including:

Novel theoretical insights on meta learning
Learning from model evaluations
Siamese networks
Meta data augmentation
Prototypical networks
Relation and matching networks
Memory-augmented neural networks
Model agnostic meta learning
Meta-SGD
Gradient agreement
Entropy maximization/reduction
Meta imitation learning
Meta learning in image/video segmentation
Meta learning in classification/tracking

Special Issue on Masked Face Recognition and Touchless Biometrics at the time of COVID-19
Submission Date: 2020-11-30

The outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has spurred the urgent development of biometric recognition technologies that are able to analyze and identify subjects wearing facial masks, especially in high security applications. Indeed, in this challenging context, the problem of face recognition is often equivalent to periocular recognition involving the iris, pupil, sclera, upper and lower eyelids, eye folds, eye corners, skin texture, fine wrinkles, skin color, skin pores, etc. Notwithstanding the enormous potential of the ocular traits in both controlled and uncontrolled environments, their possible fusion still needs to be investigated to develop robust face recognition techniques for different types of images acquired using mobile phones, near-infrared and thermal cameras, surveillance cameras, etc. Further, face dynamics, i.e., movement of facial surface due to facial muscles, has to also be taken into account since it can significantly alter facial appearance thereby introducing errors in biometric recognition approaches based only on static traits. The presence of a facial mask also necessitates the exploration of the ear as a biometric cue in profile face images. These techniques will also be relevant in other scenarios like hospitals, where sanitary masks are worn by healthcare workers in infectious disease departments, or building sites, where masks are worn by construction workers to avoid inhalation of dust.

In addition, due to hygiene considerations, the development of touchless biometric technologies has gained importance in the wake of COVID-19. Designing fingerprint sensors and systems that do not require the subject to touch a platen would be necessary to avoid transmitting germs from one user to another. Such images have to be compatible with legacy fingerprint images acquired using traditional contact-based sensors.

The goal of this Special Issue is to publish work in the biometrics field that can address the various concerns induced by the rapid spread of COVID-19.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

1. Face image reconstruction from masked faces
2. Partial face recognition from near-infrared and/or thermal images
3. Periocular biometrics
4. Iris recognition in the visible spectrum
5. Eye blink and gaze analysis
6. Pupil dynamics for biometric recognition
7. Face dynamics from occluded face images
8. Ear recognition
9. Touchless fingerprint recognition
10. Novel biometrics for minimizing infection transmission

Special Issue on Modeling and Learning for Matching: Models, Methods and Applications
Submission Date: 2020-12-30

The special issue will focus on the recent advance in modeling and learning to solve the matching problem in pattern recognition. The capability of finding correspondence among images, graphics, point sets and other structures has been a fundamental in many pattern recognition. The past decades have witnessed the rapid expansion of the frontier for automatic correspondence establishment among images/graphics, which is largely due to the advances in computational capacity, data availability and new algorithmic paradigms. Although the correspondence problem has been extensively studied in the context of multi-view geometry, its more generalized forms, along with underlying connections among different methods and settings, have not been fully explored. Meanwhile, the combination of big data and the deep learning paradigm has achieved significant success in many perceptual tasks; however, the existing paradigm is still far from a panacea to the matching problem, which often calls for more careful treatments on the local and global structures. Also, there are emerging methods for discovering latent graph structures that enrich the applicability for graph matching. In this special issue, we attempt to assemble recent advances in the matching problem, considering the explosions of big visual data applications and the deep learning algorithms.

This special issue will feature original research papers related to the models and algorithms for robust establishment of correspondence, together with applications to real-world problems.

Main Topics of Interest (but are not limited to):

Object matching: 1) Graph representation and modeling using image/graphics data; 2) Robust matching/registration for visual correspondences over two or multiple images/graphics/point sets; 3) Partial, one-to-many/many-to-many matching, in the presence of major noise and outliers; 4) Similarity between graphs/graphics and graph clustering/classification; 5) Cross-network matching, e.g. social networks and other forms e.g. protein network; 6) Incremental matching of a series of objects; 7) Shape matching.

Tracking and optical flow estimation: 1) Single/multiple object tracking and data association; 2) Robust and/or efficient optical flow methods; 3) Object co-detection; 4) Visual trajectory generation and modeling; 5) Person Re-ID; 6) Planar Object Tracking

Correspondence for 3-D vision: 1) Calibration, and pose estimation; 2) visual SLAM; 3) Depth estimation and 3-D reconstruction;

Learning for/by permutation and matching: 1) Learning graph structure and similarity from data with established or unestablished correspondences; 2) Learning image feature representation from established or loosely established correspondence; 3) Common/similar objects discovery and recognition from images; 4) Learning for matching and permutation.

Structure discovery from data: 1) structure inference from behavior data e.g. time series and event sequence; 2) latent structure matching based on behavior data

Applications: Application of matching technology to solve any real-world visual understanding problems including object detection/recognition among images/graphics, image stitching, 2-D/3-D recovery, robot vision, photogrammetry and remote sensing, industrial imaging, embed system etc. 

Special Issue on AI for Combating COVID-2019
Submission Date: 2020-12-31

Currently the COVID-2019 pandemic poses not only an immense threat to human life across the entire globe, with mounting numbers of fatalities, but it has also had an unprecedented impact on our day-day-today lives and the global economy. The fight against COVID-2019 is one of the greatest challenges faced by mankind. The whole gamut of AI techniques has attracted significant attention as well as a massive investment of time and effort among researchers seeking solutions to the problems posed by COVID-2019. For example, machine learning and deep learning have been successfully applied to the detection of COVID-2019 using medical imaging and this has become an important tool in fight against the disease.

The Pattern Recognition Journal (PRJ) will open a special submission stream to promote and collect together the latest cutting-edge AI-driven research based on using pattern recognition and machine learning methods to combat COVID-2019. The scope of the call for papers is broad and includes all areas where pattern recognition and machine learning are used in novel COVID-2019 related data processing and analysis. Also of interest are submissions on the computer-aided diagnosis and automated COVID-2019 data interpretation. We believe that this call for papers will result in a high-quality collection of original contributions that will advance research on the applications of AI for combating COVID-2019.

The topics to be considered are (but not limited to):

Machine learning or deep learning for the detection and diagnosis of COVID-2019 using medical imaging, audio or other novel sensors, or multimodal approaches.
New feature extraction and representation algorithms for the detection and diagnosis of COVID-2019.
Knowledge discovery and pattern recognition from large-scale COVID-2019 epidemiological data.
Proteomics of the COVID-2019 virus, and the quest for a vaccine.
Deep Learning/machine learning for survival rate prediction, and the analysis of factors affecting survival rate.
Severity assessment and classification of COVID-19.
Discriminating COVID-19 from other community-acquired pneumonia or respiratory disease.