Advancements of Image Processing and Vision in Healthcare

Advancements of image processing and computer vision in healthcare sectors are required to be explored. Though this arena has been expanded a lot in the last few decades, still the progresses are not satisfactory. Hence, we have endeavored to delve into the healthcare using image processing and computer vision, though sensor-based activity is also a very important area [1, 2]. Integration of various cues and modalities can enhance the performance of imageor vision-based analysis. This special issue demanded to cover the broad spectrum that benefits from the automatic understanding of medical healthcare image analysis and related topics. This special issue accepted high-quality research papers as well as review articles covering both the challenges and applications of image processing and vision in healthcare, for the betterment of human life. Various important areas are covered here, broadly medical imaging for healthcare, vision systems in healthcare applications, pattern recognition related to healthcare, big data and data mining in healthcare, multimodal integration for healthcare, affective computing, biometrics issues related to healthcare, and action or emotion or behavior analysis/ recognition [2, 3] for healthcare applications, and so forth. For example, in order to develop smart homes for elderly people, comprehending various activities based on image or video or sensor are very crucial. Though we concentrated mainly on video-based analysis from a digital camera or similar image sensors, normal and abnormal daily activity understandings/recognition [4] based on other sensors are widely explored in the last several years. This special issue was approachable in other related areas too, for example, related databases, special system or instrumentations related to healthcare, nurse robot, big data, assistive technologies, and applications.