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Image and Vision Computing New Zealand 2005 brought together more than 90 attendees from various places including New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, USA and South Korea. Two very different, but equally fascinating keynotes were presented. The first, by Professor Terry Caelli of the National ICT Australia Laboratory in Canberra, was titled "Solutions to Point Set Matching using Optimal Inference in Bayesian Networks" and discussed the idea of using dynamic programming for optimal inference on Bayesian networks. The second, by Dr Larry Spitz of DocRec which is situated in Nelson, New Zealand, was titled "A Valiant Attempt to Reconstruct Don Quixote" and discussed the problems inherent in attempting to automatically recognise the text in historical documents. Many other interesting papers were also presented. There were 145 submissions of which 89 were accepted—28 oral and 61 poster presentations. Consequently, the standard of papers was very high. This year, three prizes were presented. The best paper prize was won by Georgy Gimel'farb, John Morris, Patrice Delmas and Jiang Liu for their paper, "Noise-driven Symmetric Concurrent Stereo Matching". The best poster prize was won by Christopher Madden and Massimo Piccardi for their paper, "Height Measurement as a Session-based Biometric for People Matching Across Disjoint Camera Views". Both of these winners received extremely nice bottles of Pinot Noir from the Waitaki valley in North Otago. The best student prize was won by Xiang Wang, Reinhard Klette and Bodo Rosenhahn for their paper, "Geometric and photometric correction of projected rectangular pictures". The best student prize was a cash prize of $NZ250 kindly donated by one of our sponsors, Applied Research Associates NZ Ltd. The criteria for a student paper was that the first author be a student at the time of submission to the conference. All papers will be available online at www.cs.otago.ac.nz/ivcnz05/. Integral to the success of the conference was the kind donations by our sponsors. Our major sponsors were the Spatial Information Processing theme at the University of Otago, and ControlVision which is an industrial computer vision solutions company based in Auckland. Other sponsors included SGI New Zealand, Applied Research Associates NZ Ltd, Savant Information Systems and Hoare Research Software Ltd. Many thanks to our sponsors. The conference dinner was held at the well known Speight's Ale House which is attached to the iconic Speight's brewery—one of the larger breweries in the South Island of New Zealand. Consequently, the attendees felt obliged to partake in the fruits of the brewery which created a very good atmosphere for the dinner. There were surprisingly few sore heads the next morning, and Larry's keynote speech was well attended much to the relief of the conference organiser. A special word must be made for the excellent work behind the scenes by the local organising committee. They are: Sui-Ling Ming-Wong, Kaye Saunders, Dave Robertson, Matthew Jenkin, Jayson Mackie and Damon Simpson. Next year the conference will be hosted by Auckland University and organised by Patrice Delmas and John Morris among others. We hope that many of the IAPR community will be able to continue to support IVCNZ in the future and, for those overseas guests, to experience the fantastic place that is New Zealand. See you all next year. |
