Urban Multimedia Computing: Emerging Methods in Multimedia Computing for Urban Data Analysis and Applications

The papers in this special section focus on the topic of urban multimedia computing. Presents emerging methods in multimedia computing for urban analysis and applications. Urban computing is a process of acquisition, integration, analysis, and understanding of the urban data generated from various sources, e.g., sensors, devices, and social media, for various applications. Multimedia computing plays a vital role in urban computing due to the huge presence of multimodal sensors, heterogeneous multimedia data from the social media, multimedia interaction between human and cities. Recently, benefiting from both the easy availability of urban multimedia big data and the rapid development of deep learning technologies, some novel methods in multimedia computing have emerged as a promising tool for solving new urban computing tasks, such as quantifying the urban perception and estimating the demographic makeup of neighborhoods. Meanwhile, these advances have led to a new research direction: urban multimedia computing at the intersection between multimedia computing and urban computing. In order to effectively utilize multimedia computing methods for modeling the urban multimedia data, we should consider relevant theories from other fields. Therefore, there’s a growing demand for developing and designing new multimedia computing methods for urban data analysis and applications.