Future AI and Robotics: Visual- and Spatial-Based Perception Enhancement and Reasoning

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past several decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has been tremendously boosted by new algorithm designs, exponentially increased computing power, and an immense volume of calculation materials (i.e., data). Nevertheless, appropriate feature fusion and high-level and abstract forms of knowledge representation are required to help AI to achieve better results, as the primary goal of AI research is to enable machines to perform complex tasks that would typically require human intelligence.

Restoration and enhancement techniques for perception are active research areas in robotics, which play essential roles in helping us to perceive and understand the world, including human activity recognition, surgical medicine, geoinformatics, and remote sensing analysis.

Artificial intelligence based on computer vision has been greatly strengthened and developed and has become one of the most important development areas of robotics. Object recognition, classification, segmentation, topology, network, efficiency, navigation. and search based on spatial attributes are also anticipated to become important and valuable fields of development in artificial intelligence and robotics in the future.

Recently, intelligent reasoning has been used widely to address the significant technical issues involved in implementing AI in real-world applications, such as intelligent medical care, environmental analysis and prediction, autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, text classification, recommended systems, machine translation, and analog dialogues.

In this Special Issue, we seek groundbreaking research and case studies that demonstrate future applications and advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, especially visual- and spatial-based perception enhancement and reasoning. Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Artificial intelligence;
• Robotics;
• AI and machine learning in image processing;
• Visual question answering (VQA) and visual reasoning;
• Geospatial artificial intelligence, geospatial AI (GeoAI);
• AI in remote sensing, geoinformatics, and spatiotemporal simulation;
• AI for geospatial data acquisition, analysis, planning, and prediction;
• Visual- and spatial-based perception enhancement and reasoning;
• Visual augmentation and reconstruction, 3D reconstruction of deformable surfaces;
• Medical image (such as CT, MRI, and ultrasound) processing;
• Video-based activity recognition.

Dr. Wenfeng Zheng
Prof. Dr. Mingzhe Liu
Dr. Chao Liu
Dr. Dan Wang
Guest Editors