Micro-detail detections and their seemingly unrelated scientific inquiries

This is an introduction of the initial publication of the new Special Section of the MCFNS journal on micro-detail detection and tracking problems and various related interdisciplinary studies in other disciplines, which are deemed to be synergistic or relevant to detection and tracking problems. The initial selection of publications presented here arose from the Smolensk Conference held on Oct. 22, 2012, in Warsaw, Poland. This Special Section originated out of a collaboration between the MCFNS editors and the organizers of the Smolensk Conference, but the submissions of the presented here manuscripts was independent from this organization; all authors submitted their manuscripts independently of each other. This issue contains four of the papers related to the conference. In what follows, I briefly review the background behind the creation of this Special Section series and introduce the papers contained herein.