The First IEEE Workshop on Generic Object Recognition was held on June
16, 1997, in conjunction with CVPR '97 in Puerto Rico. The workshop
was co-chaired by Sven Dickinson (Rutgers University) and Ram Nevatia
(USC). The workshop consisted of a number of invited speakers,
including Ronen Basri (Weizmann Institute), Kevin Bowyer (USF), Chitra
Dorai (IBM Watson), David Forsyth (UC Berkeley), Gerard Medioni (USC),
Jean Ponce (UIUC), Stan Sclaroff (Boston U.), and Kaleem Siddiqi
(Yale). There were some 85 paid regsitrants, making it one of the
best-attended workshops at CVPR.
The workshop explored various methods for generic shape modeling and
matching. Many of the speakers acknowledged the need to move beyond
the CAD-based modeling schemes of the 80's and the appearance-based
modeling schemes of the 90's, both more appropriate for exemplar-based
recognition than generic recognition. It was argued by a number of
the speakers that the application of content-based image retrieval is
providing strong motivation for generic modeling and recognition,
since exact models of database objects (either 3-D or 2-D) are
typically not available.
The workshop closed with an excellent discussion that included many
members of the audience and some lively exchanges. There will be no
proceedings for the workshop, although a webpage is being prepared by
the co-chairs that will include a list of papers referenced by the
speakers during their presentations. Due to the success of the
workshop, the co-chairs are considering the possibility of organizing
a second workshop.
- Sven Dickinson and Ram Nevatia
The IEEE Workshop on Content-Based Access of Image and Video Libraries
was held in San Juan on June 20, following the 1997 Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. The purpose of this workshop
was to bring together researchers interested in the problems of
organizing, representing, querying, retrieving, annotating, and
browsing the visual content of video or image libraries.
There was a huge response to our call for papers, with 62 submissions
made for the twelve presentation slots. Each submission was reviewed
by at least two people, and the highest rated papers are included
here. Over 100 people registered for and attended this workshop.
The papers included here reflect research in computer vision and
pattern recognition to give people tools to access visual content.
In particular, the domain of video and image libraries restates the
typical automatic recognition problem as a semi-automatic problem,
assisting a human in the system loop. The papers included here
focus on various aspects of this goal, including tools for both
general and specific kinds of querying, features for color,
texture, shape, and scene structure, shot segmentation in video,
representation with compressed data, relevance feedback, and
retrieval on the World Wide Web.
This workshop also included a mid-day presentation by Bruce Croft of
the University of Massachusetts and a discussion led by Rosalind
Picard addressing the need for improved evaluation methods. The focus
of this presentation was on things our community can learn about
evaluation methods from the existing information retrieval community.
- R. Picard and F. Liu
The 1997 IEEE Workshop on Nonrigid and Articulated Motion was held last
June in Puerto Rico in conjunction with CVPR'97. The workshop
attempted to foster dialogue and debate through invited talks, panels
and contributed papers on many aspects of nonrigid and articulated
motion. A unique aspect of this workshop was the inclusion of papers
on both nonrigid and articulated motion analysis and synthesis.
The topics of the accepted papers spanned the areas of computer vision
techniques for human motion analysis and understanding, methods for
object segmentation, computer graphics methods for modeling and
animation of articulated objects, and medical image analysis
techniques. The above topics, even though they do not cover all
aspects of nonrigid and articulated motion, clearly demonstrate a
growing interest in this area. We expect that in the years to come
this interest will continue to grow and new theories and methods will
be developed which will allow the efficient solution of difficult open
problems in computer vision, graphics and medical image analysis.
The call for papers generated better than expected interest and we
received papers from all over the world. The papers accepted for
presentation at the Workshop went through a thorough reviewing
process. Each paper was reviewed by at least two members of the
program committee. The Program Committee consisted of 41 members from
various research groups. The reviewing process was blind in order to
avoid reviewing biases as much as possible. Based on the reviewers
recommendations, 14 papers were accepted for inclusion in the
proceedings. The workshop attendance was over 70 people, a clear sign
of its success and the interest of the vision community in this
area. The papers in conjunction with the two invited talks by
N. Badler and J. K. Aggarwal (the workshop Chairs) and especially the
panel, sparked lively discussions on many open research problems in
nonrigid and articulated motion analysis and synthesis.
- D. Metaxas and I. Essa
A one-day Workshop on Undergraduate Education and Image Computation
was held on the day immediately following CVPR '97. The workshop
was organized by George Stockman, Louise Stark and Kevin Bowyer.
The idea to have such a workshop was inspired by a panel discussion
held at CVPR '96 in San Francisco. For more information on the CVPR
'96 panel discussion and the CVPR '97 workshop, see the web page
http://marathon.csee.usf.edu/teaching_resources.html.
An NSF grant provided support for some attendees who might normally
not be able to attend CVPR or such a workshop. These attendees were
mostly from smaller schools that emphasize undergraduate education,
and may not have a graduate research programs. It was a very full day
for workshop attendees, with twelve presentations squeezed into the
day. It was also a full day for the presenters, with lots of
questions and interaction with the audience.
The first section of the morning was titled "New approaches in
teaching traditional computer vision courses." Two presentations
addressed the use of Java tools for on-line demonstration of computer
vision procedures. One of these papers was titled "Interactive
textbooks," by Koryllos and Fisher from the University of Edinburgh,
and the other was titled "Image processing and computer vision
instruction using Java," by Moscariello, Kasturi, and Camps from Penn
State University. The third talk in this session was "Teaching
computer vision to computer scientists," by Bruce Maxwell from the
University of North Dakota. Bruce presented a good comparison of
various computer vision textbooks and how well they lend themselves to
different approaches to teaching computer vision.
The second session was titled "Image computation in lower-level or core
courses." George Stockman from Michigan State University spoke on "A
first unit in computing with images," describing material that has been
tried in a variety of settings to introduce people to computing with
image data. Sudeep Sarkar and Dmitry Goldgof of the University of South
Florida spoke on "Image computation in the undergraduate data structures
course," describing how to teach the traditional data structures course
with examples that all involve image computing. The paper "The computer
vision component in a DSP laboratory," by Fernand Cohen and Athina Petropulu
from Drexel, discussed lab exercises for a DSP course that are oriented
toward image computation.
Ramesh Jain from the University of San Diego gave an invited
presentation titled "A sequence of courses in visual computing."
Ramesh's talk contained a number of interesting ideas. An idea for a
specific course that stands out as worth replicating at other
institutions is a course for non-majors on image computation using
visual toolkit packages.
An afternoon session was titled "Image computation in upper-level /
elective courses." Robin Murphy, from the Colorado School of Mines,
gave a presentation on "Image computation in an upper-level elective
on robotics." Milan Sonka, from the University of Iowa, gave a
presentation titled "Image computation in an upper-level elective on
medical imaging." And Mubarak Shah, from the University of Central
Florida, gave a presentation titled "Mentoring undergrads in computer
vision research projects." Each of these talks contained a number of
good ideas for better teaching and learning related to image
computation.
The last session of the day was titled "Experiences with NSF grant
programs related to undergraduate education." Mubarak Shah was called
on to speak a second time, this time emphasizing his experience with
the NSF program called "Research Experiences for Undergraduates." The
NSF REU program provides grants for "sites" and for "supplements." A
"site" is a larger coordinated activity, but does not have to be
related to other NSF support. A "supplement" is a add-on to an
existing NSF award specifically for the purpose of supporting an
undergraduate to be involved in the work. Fernand Cohen was also
called on to speak again, emphasizing his experience with the NSF
"Instrumentation for Laboratory Improvement" program. This program
provides support for laboratory equipment whose primary use is in
undergraduate education. This session was, as you might guess, very
different from the typical conference or workshop session. Mubarak
Shah and Fernand Cohen each did an excellent job of being open about
their experiences and providing good advice to others getting started
in the field.
Overall, the workshop was a great success. Everyone should have come away
with several ideas that they can use to improve the quality of their teaching.
A number of attendees suggested that the workshop should be an annual event.
The time required for planning prevents the workshop from being held at CVPR
'98, but plans are to have another workshop at CVPR '99. Also, Horst Bunke,
the editor of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial
Intelligence, has agreed to have papers from selected presentations at the
workshop appear as a special issue of IJPRAI.
-Kevin Bowyer