CAIP

This year’s CAIP was held in beautiful Münster in Germany. It took place in the former Castle of Münster which is now part of the university. Following the tradition of the CAIP conference series, it featured three days of single-track oral and poster presentations.

The conference had a record number of more than 400 submissions of which 148 were selected for presentation in oral and poster sessions. Highlights were certainly the two IAPR Invited Talks. On Tuesday, David Stork from Ricoh Innovations and Stanford University showed how Early Vision techniques are used to analyze paintings. This great talk opened technical subjects such as shape from shading to the fascinating world of understanding motivations, interests and goals of medieval and renaissance painters. Equally interesting but from a completely different perspective, Aljoscha Smolic from Disney Research, Zurich, bridged the gap between creation of computer-generated animation and a rigorous analysis of poses and transformations. Again, this talk not only presented results from computer science research but also successfully combined technical sciences and the arts.

The cross-disciplinary flavor was carried on in the conference itself. Presentation of novel results in fields of computer vision and image processing covered by this conference was the main issue of all talks and poster presentations. Still, many presentations gave a clear insight into the extent to which image analysis aspects influence areas of everyday life in the world. Examples were applications in biology and medicine, in identification and surveillance, in traffic observation and vehicle support systems, and in optical character recognition. Methodology presented at the conference covered all aspects of image-based pattern recognition and analysis. If a common topic of presentations as diverse as image processing and high level computer vision should be defined, then it is probably the incorporation of domain knowledge into the analysis process in a concise but generalizable way. In a way, this is self-evident of course, but the broadness of presented topics at this conference allowed the listener to draw connections between strategies used in the different fields. This is just the kind of added value one wishes to receive when attending such a meeting.

Two events in the evenings provided ample time to get together and gave participants the chance to get to know some of the long history of the city of Münster. On the first evening, we were taken on a guided tour exploring the old centre of the city. The large number of impressive churches in the city showed the influence of religion on the cultural and political life during medieval times and the renaissance. The tour ended at the more than 700-year old City Hall where in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia ended a 30-year religious war. The venue of the conference banquet on the following evening showed that Münster has a military history as well. It was held in the former “Heeresbäckerei” (army bakery) which has been turned into a site of commercial and cultural activities. After a site tour we had a delightful evening with eating, drinking and talking lasting well into the night.

This year’s CAIP was a high-class event conveying a good overview on current research in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition to all participants in a pleasant and communicative environment. The next CAIP will be held 2011 in Seville, Spain.

Conference Report: CAIP 2009

Report prepared by Klaus D. Toennies (Germany)