The Tenth IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications (MVA2007) was co-sponsored by the MVA Conference Committee, IAPR TC-8, and the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) at the University of Tokyo. The venue was the newly built convention hall at IIS. The oral sessions were held in the hall, with the capacity of 250; the posters were presented in the front foyer. We would like to thank Prof. Katsushi Ikeuchi, the host, for providing a comfortable environment to the participants, with both wired and wireless network.

There were 252 participants from 36 countries. The topics of the conference were algorithms and architectures of machine vision applications. From 220 submissions, 41 oral presentation and 96 poster presentations were selected. In addition to the accepted papers, there were three IAPR invited talks: “Computational Cameras” by Prof. Shree K. Nayar of Columbia University, USA; “Video Mosaicing for Non-Chronological Time Editing” by Prof. Shmuel Peleg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; and “Development of Laparoscopic Surgery Training System Using VR Technology” by Prof. Yoichi Miyake of Chiba University, Japan.

The first MVA workshop was held in Tokyo in 1988, and at every MVA conferences after MVA’98, the Most Influential Paper over the Decade Award is given to the authors of papers appearing in the conference 10 years earlier which have been recognized as having had the most significant influence on machine vision technology over the subsequent decade. At MVA2007, three papers presented at MVA’96 were selected for this award: “Visual Tracking Using Active Search for Color” by Vinod Vasudevan and Hiroshi Murase; “A System for Non-Intrusive Human Iris Acquisition and Identification” by Keith J. Hanna, Robert Mandelbaum, Deepam Mishra, Vince Paragano, and Lambert E. Wixson; and “Using Computer Vision in Real Applications: Two Success Stories” by Gérard Medioni.

The awards were handed out at the banquet held at the Komaba Eminence, where an event commemorating the 10th MVA also took place. Dr. Masakazu Ejiri, the Chair of the MVA Organization Advisory Board, gave a memorial address in honor of the late Prof. Mikio Takagi of the University of Tokyo (later Science University of Tokyo and Shibaura Institute of Technology), who led the MVA throughout its history. Also, the MVA Distinguished Contribution Award, a special award for the occasion, was presented to Prof. Masao Sakauchi of the University of Tokyo (now of National Institute of Informatics) and Prof. Roberto Cipolla of the University of Cambridge, in recognition of their active paper publication and participation in MVA over the years. As another commemorative effort, the Tenth MVA Commemorative DVD, which contains all the papers in the proceedings of the nine previous MVA’s, was given to all participants free of charge. The DVD can still be obtained for a price by contacting mva2007@cvl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

We are looking forward to having excellent papers and discussions with more researchers from all over the world at the next MVA conference.

Conference Report:  MVA 2007