This special issue of International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology (IJIST) is aimed at addressing recent advances in image analysis in close relation with a variety of present and future applications. In addition to the call for papers, personal invitations to submit papers were communicated to the authors of several selected papers presented at the 12 th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis (IWCIA 2008), held in Buffalo, NY (USA) in April 2008. The papers presented at the Workshop covered a wide range of topics and demonstrated the increasing applicability of ideas, techniques, and results of discrete mathematics to resolving important problems of image analysis. They were selected after a rigorous review process including three to four double-blind reviews per paper by highly qualified experts. As a result, only high quality papers have been accepted for presentation at IWCIA 2008.
For the first time, in addition to the traditional single theoretical track of IWCIA workshops, a Special Track on Applications was organized. It provided researchers and software developers with the opportunity to present their original work and demonstrate computer systems for image analysis. Since image analysis was developed to address practical applications, we believe that an Application Track would play an important role at future IWCIA issues as well.
The papers presented at the theoretical track of the Workshop were published as Vol. 4958 of LNCS (Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg), while those from the Special Track on Applications appeared in an edited book ''Image Analysis-From Theory to Applications'' published by Research Publishing (Singapore-Chennai). Authors of papers from both tracks were invited to submit extended versions of their conference papers to this special issue. The criteria for selecting authors to be invited included the overall score of their articles and their relevance to the scope of IJIST. As a result, most of the submitted papers appear to be substantial extensions of the work presented at the Special Track of IWCIA 2008.
The current special issue includes twelve papers. Some of them are devoted to classical subjects of image analysis, such as object detection and motion detection. Others address various other applications, in particular in medicine. A brief description of these contributions follows.
The first three papers consider different object recognition problems. In the paper ''Combining Ubiquitous Direction-Sensitive Digitizing with a Multimedia Electronic Dictionary for Enhanced Understanding'' by Reneta P. Barneva, Valentin E. Brimkov, and Kamen D. Kanev, the authors propose a novel method for enhancing books and other printed materials with layers of digital data blended with their page content. In document digitizing a patented Cluster Pattern Interface (CLUSPI 1 ) is used for providing orientation and position feedback that establishes connections with an