Pattern recognition in stained HEp-2 cells: Where are we now?

• Introduces the contents of the Special Issue.
• Provides a unified view of the approaches accepted to the Special Issue.
• Compares the methods tested over the same dataset and the same testing protocol.

Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) images are increasingly being used for the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. However, the analysis of this kind of images has until now reached a comparatively low level of automation, if compared with other medical imaging techniques. The Special Issue on the Analysis and Recognition of Indirect Immunofluorescence Images of the Pattern Recognition journal aims at providing a comprehensive evaluation of the state of the art for the staining pattern classification problem, through the adoption of a common experimental protocol and the testing of all the methods on a publicly available dataset.This paper will present both a survey of the papers accepted for the special issue, highlighting their original aspects, and a detailed comparison and discussion of the corresponding experimental results, in order to assess which are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.