Special issue on real-time computer vision in smart cities

According to United Nations, more than half of the population of the Earth now lives in urban areas. The need to rethink the city in efficient and modern ways, including new actors in the scene such as automatic decision makers, has motivated plenty of national and international initiatives to foster ICT research and innovation in this field. For the European Union, the sustainable development of urban areas is a challenge of key importance: it requires new, efficient, and user-friendly technologies and services, thus becoming one of the main topics within the European Research Programme “Horizon 2020”