Dear drone imaging scientists and engineers,

you are invited to submit an original, unpublished technical paper to the Special Session "Image and video analysis for autonomous drones" of EUSIPCO 2021: https://eusipco2021.org/. New submission deadline for the EUSIPCO conference is March 1, 2021.

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or drones) are becoming more and more important to many industries, promising simplified logistics, cost reductions, increased safety for humans, quicker response times and more accurate results, when compared to traditional procedures. Drones are highly useful thanks to their easy deployment, their aerial point-of-view and their ability to access difficult-to-reach spaces. Recent advances in aerial robotics and AI have already pushed drone automation to an unprecedented degree in various application domains, such as infrastructure inspection and maintenance, aerial cinematography, search and rescue operations, etc. Manipulation, processing, analysis and learning of visual signals lie at the forefront of this revolution. This special session will consider current research in this interdisciplinary subject, aiming to bring together researchers working on image/video analysis and experts in aerial robotics. Topics of interest may include, among others: - Embedded computer vision - Deep learning for image/video analysis - Multimodal perception - Sensor and data fusion - Fault and anomaly detection in drone footage - Subcentimeter-accuracy inspection - Autonomous drone cinematography - Vision-based localization and mapping - Vision-based drone navigation/control - Vision-based human-drone interaction

This Special Session concerns a very timely topic with high industrial potential, given that fully/semi- automated drones are slowly emerging as a viable alternative to manually teleoperated ones, thanks to recent advances in robotics and AI. A lot of underlying cognitive functionalities that enable such autonomy, particularly the ones facilitating drone perception, rely on advanced image/video analysis methods for achieving their goals, making this a highly interdisciplinary topic of exceptional interest both to imaging scientists and aerial robotics researchers.

The Special Session is organized by Prof. I. Pitas and Dr. I. Mademlis, from the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis Lab (AIIA Lab), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTH), under the auspices of the EU-funded Horizon 2020 programme AERIAL-CORE (https://aerial-core.eu/).

Relevant links: 1) Horizon2020 EU funded R&D project Aerial-Core: https://aerial-core.eu/ 2) AIIA Lab: https://aiia.csd.auth.gr/

Sincerely yours, Prof. I. Pitas, Dr. Ioannis Mademlis, Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) Lab, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece