CVonline, the Evolving, Distributed, Non-Proprietary, On-Line Compendium of Computer Vision, is one of the key online research and teaching resource for computer vision students and researchers.� Its goal is to be a first point of introduction for every major image analysis concept, with enough content that you could determine if the concept is relevant to your current task.� In short, it is a sort of online encyclopedia for computer vision, machine vision and image processing, etc.� When we first started developing CVonline, in jest we subtitled it ``The Evolving, Distributed, Non-Proprietary, On-Line Compendium of Computer Vision'', but this is close to what it has become.�

 

CVonline currently provides explanations for about 1100 of the 1400 listed vision-related topics, organized into 19 top level categories.� About half of the topics have tutorial-style explanations, with an example and with sufficient technical detail that the work can be reproduced.� Under each of the 19 top level categories is a further hierarchy. Some top level categories, e.g., representation, have many screens of topics. Others,� e.g., non-standard architectures, have only a single screen of topics. Topics with content have hot links to one or more explanations of the topic, with over 3000 contributions.�

 

At the moment, CVonline is accessed about 3500 times/week through its entry page and undoubtedly has many more direct accesses to topics through Google.� CVonline has received over 400K accesses since logging started in November, 1999.�

 

Funding for the development of CVonline has come from a variety of sources: the European Community's ECVision Network, the British Machine Vision Association and the University of Edinburgh, particularly for the infrastructure.� However, the main source of the content is the vision community, with direct contributions from about 350 people and many other ``contributions'' from authors with material on the web.�

 

Technology behind CVonline:�

The tree structured topic pages were created in pure HTML (by hand) and conform to the ``W3C HTML 4.01 strict'' standard.� Content pages are generated by a PERL script that is given the TAG number of the topic, with content generated from a flat plain text file database.� The search engine is HTDIG (www.htdig.org).

 

A bit of history:�

CVonline was conceived in the pub (of course) in Vienna during ICPR 1996.� We had been discussing the problems of textbooks for our classes - whenever you find a good book, it seems to go out of print or become too expensive.� We had also recently finished the HIPR (homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2)package and were excited by the possibilities of the web and control of the content.� Within a year, the basic structure was complete, with all the content listed after each topic label.� The lowest level topics were inspired by a few textbooks and by USC's Annotated Computer Vision Bibliography (iris.usc.edu/Vision-Notes/bibliography/contents.html).� From that time, the basic hierarchy was set; however, there has been much re-arrangement of the structure to remove redundancy, remove misplaced or misunderstood relationships and certainly to add new material.�

 

Several early collections of online course notes (Andy Wallace, David Marshall, Robyn Owens, Ian Young, Jan Gerbrands, Lucas Van Vliet, David Young) and conference tutorial notes (Boyle and Hogg/BMVC95,Zisserman/EPSRC Summer School 1995, Thacker and Cootes/BMVC96) got the content initialized.� For the rest, we asked conference paper authors whose research overlapped with CVonline topics, got a few voluntary contributions, went web-surfing, and made creating a web page one of the assignments on our computer vision course.� Now more than 80% of the topics have content.� With the growth of the content links,� it eventually became hard to see the structure of the topic hierarchy.� In 2003, we added the server-based PERL script method (funded by the ECVision network) that separated the topic tree from the content.�

 

The most recent development was the catalog of vision related books, where we try to list all modern computer vision, image processing and closely related books.� The catalog contains online books, books with online support sites, as well as traditional physical books.� For editorial reasons, we decided to omit most conference proceedings.� Currently we have 308 books listed (24 online, 30 web supported, 254 others).� The growth rate of the field can also be seen from the book publication dates (1950's: 1; 1960's: 1; 1970's: 18; 1980's: 66; 1990's: 150; 2000-2004: 72).

 

Future Developments:�

The most realistic view of the future CVonline is one of incremental expansion. New topics and terms appear due to research developments.� Given the great growth in research over the past 10 years, I fully expect that CVonline will also continue to grow in content.� What would an ideal resource consist of?� The individual entries should be written and cross-referenced to a common level.� The mathematical notation and terminology should be consistent, with a high level roadmap linking them.� Each entry should have a set of examples, standard test datasets, free code for algorithms and an interactive exploration of the topic.� There should be citations to deeper discussions of the topic.�

 

BOOKSBOOKSBOOKS

CVonline: an overview

 

By:� Robert B. Fisher, Editor, CVonline

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

 

homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/