As cameras become more pervasive in our daily life, vast amounts of video data are generated. The popularity of YouTube and similar websites such as Tudou and Youku provides strong evidence for the increasing role of video in society. One of the main challenges confronting us in the era of information technology is to - fectively rely on the huge and rapidly growing video data accumulating in large multimedia archives. Innovative video processing and analysis techniques will play an increasingly important role in resolving the difficult task of video search and retrieval. A wide range of...