CIVR

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) is a prominent technical conference in this field. After 5 editions, CIVR has now become an official ACM Conference and an IAPR co-sponsored event since 2007 in Amsterdam (thanks to the initiatives by 2007 co-chairs Marcel Worring and Nicu Sebe).

The 2008 edition was chaired by Jiebo Luo and Ling Guan. CIVR is the dedicated annual professional meeting for communicating the state-of-the-art research and technology in image and video retrieval. As in previous years, starting with the first CIVR conference in 2002 and continuing to the first ACM-branded CIVR in 2007, the conference seeks to illuminate the state of the art in image and video retrieval between researchers and practitioners throughout the world and provide an international forum for the discussion of challenges in the fields of image and video retrieval. In a nutshell, CIVR covers all aspects of image and video retrieval, from underlying technologies and theories to applications and practice. The three-day conference consisted of three major parts: the regular and special session tracks on Monday and Tuesday, a full Practitioner’s Day on Wednesday, and the VideoOlympics exhibition showcasing live-action video search and retrieval. We were excited to host two research keynote presentations by Prof. Jiawei Han of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Prof. Alberto Del Bimbo of University of Florence, as well as one application keynote by Dr. Edward Chang of Google Research, China.

The program co-chairs, Alan Hanjalic, Mohan Kankanhalli, and Ivan Lee, were responsible, along with a program committee of 70 members, for selecting the full paper program for the regular paper track. The regular paper track received 123 paper submissions. The rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 15 oral presentations and 42 poster presentations. This represents an acceptance rate of 12% for oral and 34% overall.

To highlight important and emerging topics, the number of special sessions increased from one in 2007 to three in the research track and one in the practitioner track in 2008. The special sessions co-chairs Lexing Xie and Qi Tian did an excellent job identifying and coordinating the various special topics. The co-chairs of the Practitioners’ Day program, James Wang and Nozha Boujemaa, put together an impressive line-up of talks for the application side of CIVR. The co-chairs of the VideoOlympics, Marcel Worring, Cees Snoek, Rong Yan, and Alex Hauptmann, made the much anticipated event another great success with more participating teams and a highly involved audience. All the organizers put in an enormous amount of work to bring an exciting and high quality conference, and their contributions are much appreciated by us and the entire CIVR community. In particular, Ivan Lee received a special recognition for doing double and triple duties for the conference since its genesis (and well after the conference concluded).

With the strong technical program and social program, 120 participants, and healthy finance, the CVIR 2008 conference was a great success.

Conference Report: CIVR 2008

Report prepared by:

Jiebo Luo