Different types of cyber-physical systems (CPS) will affect every aspect of our life in near future. Semiconductor and internet revolutionized technologies have transformed our lives and our interactions with information and communication technology. Now we are going to live with a new paradigm of CPS that will transform the way we interact with and manipulate the physical systems. CPS are a new generation of systems that integrate computing and communication capabilities with the dynamics of physical and engineered systems. Society has begun to realize the way in which CPS are going to impact the economy and social structure. Therefore vast investments are being made worldwide to develop this technology. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable. So we have a wide and open area of research to explore and exploit the challenges and immense research opportunities in CPS that communicate with other machines and also interact with people. CPS are a natural consequence of an increasingly connected physical world.

The major applications of CPS include smart electric grid, smart buildings, smart transportation, next-generation air traffic management, advanced manufacturing, smart medical technologies, automatic pilot avionics, autonomous vehicles, etc. Hence, CPS should run dependably, safely, securely and efficiently in real world applications. More commonly, CPS users connect with each other and transfer data directly, and perform operations asynchronously on the basis of underlying cyber-infrastructure. Over the past two decades, the number of cyber components has grown gradually to the point where CPS are now becoming software-intensive systems with more and more integrated computing hardware and computational algorithms. In today’s scenario of CPS, software dominates all aspects of connecting the physical and cyber worlds by orchestrating the computation, communications, and control (CCC) technologies. Consequently, the engineering of high-confidence CPS has also evolved with the help of different new emerging technologies. Some of these additional types of interactions are due to advanced machine vison algorithms. Tremendous progress has been made in advancing machine vision algorithms for CPS technology over the last five years. More advanced machine vision algorithms in CPS have solved a wide range of challenges in real-time interaction between physical systems and dynamic environments, and the efficiency issues in smart homes, buildings, communities and connected vehicle systems, together with their reliability.

Machine vision based CPS refer to computer vision-based systems where assumptions like controlled surroundings do not hold. Furthermore, exploring the domain of computer vision algorithms provides dozens of new opportunities. Machine vision based CPS raise the need of applied research that focuses on the technology transfer from academics towards practitioners, yielding several challenges like top-notch accuracies, real-time processing, minimal training data, minimal manual input, user-friendly interfaces, etc. The goal of machine vision technologies in CPS is to achieve a close integration of cyber systems and physical systems, and to detect and control physical systems in a real-time, secure, reliable, efficient, and adaptive manner with help of different machine vision technologies.

This special issue aims to provide a platform for the research community and professionals to demonstrate solutions and address research challenges in the machine vision based CPS. Further, diffusion of CPS with machine vision technologies will open new horizons and research domains that may be of interest to readers and the research community. This special issue aims at publishing high-quality manuscripts covering new research on topics related to implementation of CPS with help of machine vision technologies.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Intelligent video surveillance
• Intelligent transportation system
• Crowd behaviour analysis
• Smart parking in smart cities
• Smart cyber security
• Zero-day detection
• Biometrics
• Urban area mapping and navigation
• Medical diagnosis
• Semantic scene understanding
• Fault detection and diagnosis
• Distributed sensing, multimodal sensor fusion
• Reconstruction and mapping
• Vision based control, human system interaction
• Knowledge-based systems
• Intelligent, adaptive and personalized user interfaces
• Virtual and augmented reality
• Mobile cyber physical systems
• Autonomous automobile system
• Robotics
• Autonomous medical monitoring
• Automatic pilot avionics
• Industrial control system
• Smart grid
• Other cyber physical systems involving machine vision
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Guest Editors

Dr. Manish Khare (Lead Guest Editor)
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
Email: manish_khare@daiict.ac.in

Dr. Ashish Khare
University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India
Email: khare@allduniv.ac.in

Prof. Moongu Jeon
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, Republic of Korea
Email: mgjeon@gist.ac.kr

Prof. Ishwar K. Sethi
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
Email: isethi@oakland.edu

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Important Dates

Manuscript submission deadline: 31 October, 2020
First review notification: 31 December, 2020
Revised manuscript submission: 15 February, 2021
Final decision: 15 March, 2021
Final manuscript submission: 31 March, 2021

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Submission Guidelines

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the Multimedia Tools and Applications website. Authors should submit through the online submission site at https://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap/default.aspx and select “SI 1200 - Machine Vision Theory and Applications for Cyber Physical Systems” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the special issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least three independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process.

The special issue will consider papers extending previously published conference papers, provided the journal submission presents a significant contribution beyond the conference paper. Authors must explain in the introduction to the paper the new contribution to the field made by the submission, and the original conference publication should be cited in the text. Note that neither verbatim transfer of large parts of the conference paper nor wholesale reproduction of already published figures is acceptable.