Guest Editorial Special Issue on Evolutionary Computer Vision

Evolutionary Computer Vision (ECV) is at the intersection of two major research fields of artificial intelligence: 1) computer vision (CV) and 2) evolutionary computation (EC). This special issue brings an overview of state-of-the-art contributions to the latest research and development in the discipline. CV includes methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images. The aim is to design computational models of human and animal perception. ECV is an interdisciplinary research area where analytical methods combined with powerful stochastic optimization and metaheuristic approaches produced human-competitive results. From an engineering standpoint, ECV aims to design software and hardware solutions useful for solving challenging CV problems. From a scientific viewpoint, the goal is to enhance our current understanding of visual processing in nature and replicate this within a seeing machine. ECV is a well-established research discipline as evolutionary algorithms are more efficient than classical optimization approaches for the discontinuous, nondifferentiable, multimodal, and noisy search, optimization, and learning problems arising in many CV tasks. EC has also demonstrated its ability as a robust approach to cope with the fundamental steps of image processing, image analysis, and image understanding included in the CV pipeline (e.g., restoration, segmentation, registration, classification, reconstruction, or tracking).