In this issue, we have two regular papers and six selected papers from the Cyberworlds Conference 2013, followed by 2 eratums concerning two papers. A retracti on note is also included.

The first regular paper deals with artistic preprocessing for painterly rendering and image stylization by Yu Zang, Hua Huang, Chen-Feng Li. This paper proposes a practical image enhancing technique as a preprocessing step for painterly rendering and image stylization, which transforms the input image mimicking the vision of artists. The second paper is entitled ‘Jacobians and Hessians of mean value coordinates for closed triangular meshes’ by Jean-Marc Thiery, Julien Tierny, Tamy Boubekeur. It introduces the analytic expressions of the Jacobian and the Hessian of functions interpolated through mean value coordinates. The remaining papers are described in the preface of the Cyberworld section.

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Editor-in-Chief

Preface to the Cyberworlds 2013 papers’ section

This section includes the extended versions of six articles presented at Cyberworlds, Yokohama , Japan in October 2013. The six presented papers cover the most fundamental topics of Cyberworlds. The first paper “Procedural Approach to Volumetric Terrain Generation”, by Aitor Santamaría Ibirika, Xabier Cantero, Mikel Salazar, Jaime Devesa, Igor Santos, Sergio Huerta and Pablo García Bringas proposes a new procedural approach to volumetric terrain generation. The second paper, “Procedural Architecture using Deformation-Aware Split Grammars”, by Rene Zmugg, Wolfgang Thaller, Ulrich Krispel, Johannes Edelsbrunner, Sven Havemann and Dieter W. Fellner”, presents a new technique for procedurally generating large-scale urban structures using an extended split grammar system. The third paper, “Online Robust Action Recognition Based on a Hierarchical Model”, by Xinbo Jiang, Fan Zhong, Qunsheng Peng and Xueying Qin, introduces a novel technique for recognizing human action with Kinect in real time. The fourth paper, “Mono-spectrum Marker: An AR Marker Robust to Image Blur and Defocus” by Masahiro Toyoura, Haruhito Aruga, Matthew Turk and Xiaoyang Mao, describes a new planar marker which can be accurately detected in blurred and defocused images. The fifth paper, “Railroad Online: Acquiring and Visualizing Route Panoramas of Rail Scenes” by Shengchun Wang, Siwei Luo, Yaping Huang, Jiang-Yu Zheng, Peng Dai and Qiang Han, is a work tackling the visualization of the forward motion video by rendering a full route panorama around the railway into a virtual interactive scene. The last paper, “Situation Awareness of Cancelable Biometric System” by Padma Polash Paul, Marina L. Gavrilova, and Stanislav Klimenko, presents a novel architecture for template generation in the context of situations awareness system in real and virtual application. We are deeply grateful to the Visual Computer Editor-in-Chief, Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, and all Editorial Staff for their continuing help and assistance during the whole process of these papers’ preparation.

Xiaoyang Mao, Lichan Hong