Advanced Technologies and Future Trends in Visual Recognition and Signal Processing

Dear Colleagues,

Research into visual recognition and signal processing has accelerated dramatically in recent years, fueled by breakthroughs in deep learning, the proliferation of novel sensor modalities, and the surging demand for intelligent, real-time data analysis across a wide range of applications. From autonomous vehicles and smart surveillance to medical imaging, augmented/virtual reality, remote sensing, and multimedia analytics, next-generation systems must tackle ever-growing data volumes, stringent latency and energy constraints, and the need for robust, interpretable, and secure inference. At the same time, foundational advances—such as transformer-based architectures, large-scale pre-trained vision and vision-language models, generative AI, spiking neural networks, event-based vision, and neuromorphic hardware—are reshaping how we perceive, process, and synthesize visual and multimodal signals.

The main aim of this Special Issue is to solicit high-quality original contributions that address emerging applications and recent breakthroughs in next-generation visual recognition and signal processing. We invite both theoretical and practical studies spanning algorithms, system architectures, hardware implementations, and benchmark evaluations.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Fundamental models and theoretical advances in visual recognition and signal processing;
• Transformer-based architectures for images, video, and multimodal data;
• Large-scale pre-trained vision and vision-language foundation models;
• Generative models for visual data synthesis, augmentation, and editing (GANs, VAEs, diffusion models);
• Spiking neural networks, event-driven processing, and neuromorphic computing;
• Event-based cameras, asynchronous sensors, and bio-inspired vision systems;
• Multimodal fusion and cross-modal learning (vision, audio, radar, lidar, text);
• Domain adaptation, few-/zero-shot learning, continual and federated learning;
• Compressive sensing, sparse representations, and graph signal processing;
• Explainable AI, interpretability, trustworthiness, and security in visual systems;
• Adversarial robustness, anomaly detection, and reliability under uncertainty;
• Real-time embedded, edge-AI, and IoT system design for intelligent sensing;
• Hardware accelerators, FPGA/ASIC implementations, and energy-efficient architectures;
• Emerging applications: autonomous systems, healthcare imaging, AR/VR, smart cities, environmental monitoring.

Dr. Shuwei Huo
Dr. Di Yao
Prof. Dr. Jing-Ming Guo
Dr. Beiwen Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• visual recognition
• signal processing
• artificial intelligence
• deep learning
• next-generation technology
• trend analysis