The rapid proliferation of urbanization has modernized many people's lives and also engendered critical issues, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption, and environmental pollution. These urbanization challenges seriously deteriorate people's life quality in big cities. Nowadays, sensing technologies and large-scale computing infrastructures have produced a variety of big data in urban spaces, which provide rich knowledge about a city to help tackle these challenges. Consequently, the intelligent urban computing, which holistically exploits the big data in big cities to improve the urban environment, human life quality, and city operation systems, has obtained massive attention in research and industrial fields. Many efforts have been dedicated to connecting unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management and analytics models, and novel visualization methods to structure intelligent urban computing systems for smart cities. Furthermore, the intelligent systems and applications are emerging and becoming pervasive in the field of urban planning, transportation systems, environmental conservation, energy consumption, social applications, economy, public security, and presenting representative scenarios.The goal of this special issue is to call for a coordinated effort to understand the opportunities and challenges emerging in intelligent urban computing with big data, identify key tasks, and evaluate the state-of-the-art methods, showcase innovative methodologies and ideas, introduce interesting real-world intelligent urban computing systems or applications, propose new real-world datasets and discuss future directions. We solicit original contributions in all fields of intelligent urban computing that explore the big data in big cities to help us understand the nature of urban phenomena and even predict the future of cities.With the assistance of professional referees, 11 papers out from 33 submissions are accepted after at least two rounds of rigorous reviews. Four of them were developed from conference contributions at IEEE CCIS 2016 [4,5,7,10]. Seven other papers are selected in response to an open call for papers. These papers cover a wide range of subtopics of intelligent urban computing with big data, including intelligent video surveillance [4,5,11], intelligent urban sensing technologies [8,10], machine vision algorithms in urban computing [2,3,9], intelligent traffic system [7], 3D vision in urban computing [1,6].In the first paper, Huang et al. [4] propose a novel human body segmentation framework based on shape constraint. The shape constraint is the combination of human star convexity and body parts' locations with high precision. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on public challenging datasets. Li et al. [5] propose a new person re-identification framework. They firstly design a Siamese Inception network to 123