Introduction to the Special Section on Visual Computing in the Cloud: Fundamentals and Applications

Cloud computing involves a large number of terminals connected through a real-time high-speed network (such as the Internet). The adoption rates for private and hybrid cloud services increased to 40% in 2013, with computing shifting from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. To keep pace with the ever-accelerating rate of innovation, companies are moving to the cloud. However, visual computing in the cloud brings great challenges, such as how to measure and then improve the quality of experience in cloud computing. This Special Section provides the image/video community a forum to present new academic research and industrial development in running visual computing services in the cloud. This Special Section aims to address fundamental and practical aspects of visual computing in the cloud, such as how to build cloud platforms that can cope with seemingly unlimited supply of content coming from traditional media sources as well as new media uploaded to the Internet (YouTube, Facebook, etc.); how to leverage cloud technology to build high-quality image/video browsing and delivery experiences for a global audience; how to ingest, encode, process, adapt, as well as protect contents and privacy of users; how to provide both on-demand and live-streaming capabilities; how to tag image/video and allow consumers to access the image/video contents with high availability; how to support image/video services in mobile devices; and how to perform real-time image/video analytics in the cloud, to mention a few among a diverse range of challenges.