BMVA News – Items for Inclusion
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
NewsABMV The Newsletter of the British Machine Vision Association and Volume 18 Number 4 Society for Pattern Recognition June 2008 Editor: Professor Roy Davies Department of Physics Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX Tel: +44(0)1784 443497 Fax: +44(0)1784 472794 http://www.bmva.ac.uk/ email: [email protected] News 1 is published every three Editorial: Journal Roles and Ratings months. Contributions on any activity related to machine vision or pattern recognition The other day I set about upgrading my talk on Low- are eagerly sought. These could include reports on Level Vision for the BMVA Summer School, and found technical activities such as conferences, workshops or it a virtually impossible task – how can one cover such a other meetings. Items of timely or topical interest are subject properly in 1½ hours? However, I then reasoned also particularly welcome; these might include details of that with a suitable handout, I could guide the students funding initiatives, programmatic reports from ongoing carefully through crucial, more advanced topics. After projects and standards activities. Items for the next all, it’s not just the 1½ hours that are important but also edition should reach the editor by 1 September 2008. the ensuing weeks and months, so a handout could produce a very significant amplifying effect. So I proceeded to develop the SIFT (scale invariant feature Contents transform) concept and found a whole set of papers dating from 1998 to 2006 which were not only relevant Editorial: Journal Roles and Ratings.............................1 but remarkably closely interlinked – parallel strands and IAPR Fellowships Awarded ..........................................2 cross-fertilisation being evident as well as natural BMVC 2008 – Call for Participation.............................3 sequential development. Personal Chair for Majid Mirmehdi! .............................3 Human Action Video Data for All.................................3 The set of 13 papers I came up with were themselves remarkable in their outlets: 6 in IJCV, 3 in ECCV, 2 in A View on ISBI 2008 ....................................................4 Smart Environments Symposium ..................................5 BMVC, 1 in ICCV, and just 1 in PAMI. The contrast between IJCV and PAMI was interesting, as my Nominations for BMVA Executive Committee.............6 personal mindset had it that PAMI is the most respected Book for Review............................................................6 Machine Learning – Call for Participation ....................7 journal in our area; and the fact that significant numbers of authors chose ECCV and BMVC (conferences rather BMVC 1508 AD! ..........................................................7 than journals) as the prime outlets for new advances is Fifth VIE Conference ....................................................8 Personal Chair for Stephen McKenna! ..........................8 also salutary. New Developments with the Annals .............................8 Should we be surprised by this indication of the Forthcoming BMVA meetings ......................................9 BMVA News – Items for Inclusion...............................9 supremacy of IJCV over PAMI? Well, looking at the most recent list of impact factors (see table overleaf), Poster Session Success at Summer School ....................9 one would have to say “Yes”, though the difference in impact factors is actually miniscule – 3.381 and 3.579 respectively. But maybe these journals have different 1 The British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern roles. I have sometimes heard PAMI being described as Recognition is a Company limited by guarantee, No. 2543446, an ‘archival journal’ (is that one which is used to store registered in England and Wales. Registered Office: Granta Lodge, material at the end of its development cycle?). And by 71 Graham Road, Malvern, WR14 2JS. The Association is a non- profit-making body and is registered as charity No. 1002307. the same token maybe we should regard IJCV as a 1 2 BMVA News Volume 18 Number 4 workhorse journal, where ‘hot’ material that hasn’t yet factor of one journal changed from 0.576 to 1.138 to settled down is placed, in the likelihood that it will soon 0.952 to 0.853 over four years – indicating that the error be replaced by even more exciting work. (I jest a little – bars may be as high as ± 0.3. Actually, I understand that though maybe not by much). such variations are liable to arise because even one highly cited article can significantly affect the scores. Rather than develop this binary argument further, let us Think about it: that article could be yours! Indeed, your look at the impact factors for journals that are of paper could change the scoring system by which it will relevance to BMVA. First, it is unfortunately the case eventually be judged! that the new and in my opinion excellent IET journals IP and CV are absent because they were introduced too Professor Roy Davies recently to have impact factors. Next, I have included a Editor, BMVA News number of medical and physics titles as controls – and email: [email protected] so that one can see the giddy heights to which some journals aspire. Reviews of Modern Physics 38.403 Nature 28.751 IAPR Fellowships Awarded Lancet 28.638 Nature Medicine 26.382 Science 26.372 Physical Review Letters 6.944 J Vision 3.791 Cognitive Brain Research 3.769 Applied Physics Letters 3.596 IEEE T PAMI 3.579 Int J Computer Vision 3.381 IEEE T Medical Imaging 3.275 IEEE Signal Proc Magazine 2.907 Roy Davies Bob Fisher Mark Nixon IEEE T Neural Networks 2.769 The BMVA has just been successful in having three of IEEE T Image Process 2.462 its members selected as 2008 Fellows of the Real-Time Imaging 2.270 International Association of Pattern Recognition J MRI 2.209 (IAPR) 2 in recognition of their ‘scientific/engineering Vision Research 2.055 excellence’ and ‘well-known international achievements Pattern Recognition 2.019 in the field of pattern recognition’. The three have long IEEE T Computers 1.680 associations with the BMVA, having organised many IEEE T Signal Processing 1.640 conferences, meetings and publications, and all have IEEE T Vis Computer Graphics 1.600 been on the Executive Committee or (in Bob Fisher’s Comput Vision Image Understanding 1.417 case) have been responsible for the Northern Chapter of IEEE T Systems Man Cybern B 1.353 the BMVA. Measurement Science Technology 1.297 IEEE Signal Processing Letters 1.115 The BMVA would like to present its own J Modern Optics 1.074 congratulations to Professors Davies, Fisher and Nixon Image Vision Computing 1.027 on having their work recognised internationally with Electronics Letters 1.009 this prestigious award. IEEE Spectrum 0.933 IEEE T Systems Man Cybern A 0.868 The BMVA is indebted to Professor Edwin Hancock for Pattern Recognition Letters 0.853 handling the nomination and endorsement process of the Applied Maths Computing 0.821 successful Fellows on its behalf. Signal Processing 0.737 Machine Vision Applications 0.682 Dr Majid Mirmehdi Microprocessors Microsystems 0.524 University of Bristol Int J Pattern Recognition 0.374 email: [email protected] Obviously, reducing journals to numbers in this way is artificial and even misleading because of its mono- dimensionality. Also, the figures are given to three 2 It may not be generally known to BMVA members that the decimal places (not my doing), but note that the impact Association is affiliated to the IAPR, which is in effect its mother- organisation. BMVA News Volume 18 Number 4 3 BMVC 2008 – Call for Participation Personal Chair for Majid Mirmehdi! British Machine Vision Conference 2008, Leeds, UK, 1–4 September. Dr Majid Mirmehdi has been promoted to a personal http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/bmvc2008/ chair at the University of Bristol, taking up the post on 1 August. He has a broad range of interests in computer The British Machine Vision Conference is the main UK vision including colour texture analysis, active contours, conference on machine vision and related areas. and tracking. He has developed new techniques in these Organised by the British Machine Vision Association, areas in application to medical and social imaging, the 19th BMVC will be held 1–4 September 2008 at the quality inspection, and scene analysis, amongst others. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. Current projects include prior-less shape extraction, scene segmentation for the blind, and tracking text in The conference will present 120 high-quality papers in natural scenes, as well as applications in heart and brain the field of computer vision, in single-track oral and imaging. An edited book entitled Handbook of Texture poster sessions. Topics of the oral sessions include: Analysis is due out later this year. Last but not least, Majid has been Chair of the BMVA since late 2005. • 2D/3D Tracking • Object & Scene Recognition Finally, let me say that it has been a pleasure to work • 3D Geometry, Reconstruction & Registration alongside Majid for the past few years: his quiet • Video, Biometrics & Activity Understanding efficiency has been matched by new initiatives and due • Image Representation & Reconstruction attention to all the other matters that have helped to • Vision meets Graphics make BMVA what it is. I am sure you will all join with me in congratulating Majid on his well-deserved In addition to the contributed papers, the conference promotion! will include keynote presentations by Ramin Zabih, Professor of Computer Science and Radiology at Professor Roy Davies Cornell University, USA, and Cordelia Schmid, INRIA Editor, BMVA News Research Director at INRIA Rhones-Alpes, France. email: [email protected] Professor Philip Torr of Oxford Brookes University, UK will give the conference tutorial on the topic of “Markov Random Fields for Vision & Graphics”. Human Action Video Data for All BMVC will also host the First International Workshop on Tracking Humans for the Evaluation of Motion in As part of the EPSRC-funded REASON project, we Image Sequences (THEMIS 2008).