Special Issue on Intelligent Integrated Systems for Human-Oriented Information Society

Recent advance in the information technology makes our society very convenient from the viewpoint of human-to-human information communication. However, our new living style will require not only human-tohuman communication but also autonomous intelligent applications that support human beings such as an intelligent robot system, an intelligent transportation system, and a security/safe system as shown in Figure. These applications will contribute to human-oriented information society.Intelligent vehicle Home service robot Security The use of special-purpose VLSI processors capable of processing a large amount of real-world data is essential to make such applications realistic. In recent industrial trend, the special-purpose processors are called ""System LSIs"". One of the most important environmental informations in real-world applications is a vision information. The factor common to the applications is to catch an environment information moment by moment and to respond quickly with it. Therefore, it is important to make the response time from inputs to outputs very small. In this case, sensor data transfer bottleneck is not allowed as well as memory-to-PE (Processing Element) data transfer bottleneck. An image sensor signal processing VLSI together with image sensor devices is a key issue in such applications. From the above point of views, this special issue was planned to demonstrate the recent results of this area. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the authors for their efforts and contributions to this special issue and also the members of the Editorial Board for their cooperation.