Introduction to the Issue on Signal Processing for Situational Awareness from Networked Sensors and Social Media

The fourteen articles in this special section focus on the topic of situational awareness in the signal processing field. This concept is of great interest in law enforcement, disaster management, environmental monitoring, etc. At the same time, distributed data sources are common today and generate a wealth of information, e.g., surveillance cameras, smartphones, RFID (proximity) sensors. However, there exists a gap between the wealth of distributed information captured and the understanding of a scene where the sensors are located. The goal of this special issue is an attempt at bridging this gap by bringing together various signal processing methodologies associated with data analysis.