The Third Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2006) took place June 7-9th in Quebec City, Canada.  This conference was the third successor to 16 Vision Interface (VI) conferences, the last of which was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2003.  CRV 2006 continued the VI/CRV tradition of providing an excellent forum for the Canadian and International Computer and Robot Vision communities to share their work. As usual, our conference was sponsored by CIPPRS/ACTIRF (Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society/Association Canadienne de Traitment d'Images et de Reconnaissance des Formes) and endorsed by IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), with additional support provided by the Canadian Space Agency. CIPPRS/ACTIRF is a special interest group of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) and is the official Canadian member of the governing board of the IAPR. The goal of CIPPRS/ACTIRF is to promote research and development activities in Computer Vision, Robot Vision, Image Processing, Medical Imaging, and Pattern Recognition.

 

In addition to our sponsors, the conference proceedings were published by the IEEE Computer Society, and will be available on-line through IEEE Xplore and the IEEE/IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) Electronic Libraries (IEL).  The proceedings are also indexed through the INSPEC indexing service.  The best papers from CRV 2005 will be appearing in a special issue of the Journal of Image and Vision Computing.  We are currently making similar arrangements for CRV 2006.

 

This year, we had an excellent collection of papers which were reviewed by at least two reviewers each from a 61 member program committee assembled from a worldwide community of vision researchers. We received a total of 113 submissions, out of which 35 papers were accepted for oral presentation (31 percent), while another 35 papers were accepted as poster papers (31 percent).  We believe all of the conference papers are of excellent quality.

 

CRV is attracting broad international participation.  Submissions were received from 19 different countries, and papers from 12 different countries were accepted.  While Canada remains the dominant source of papers, this year's CRV features 21 papers from international participants (30 percent).

 

At the conference banquet, we were pleased to present 4 paper awards: 

 

¨ Robert Sim, Pantelis Elinas, Matt Griffin, Alex Shyr, and James J. Little received the Best Robotics Paper award for their paper titled "Design and analysis of a framework for real-time vision-based SLAM using Rao-Blackwellised particle filters".

 

¨ Weihua Xiong and Brian Funt won the Best Vision Paper award for their paper titled "Stereo Retinex".

 

¨ The IAPR Best Student Paper award went to Aniket Murarka, Joseph Modayil, and Benjamin Kuipers for their paper titled "Local Safety Maps for a Wheelchair Robot using Vision and Lasers".

 

¨ The IAPR Best Paper award for CRV 2006 was given to Dan Levi and Shimon Ullman for their paper titled "Learning to classify by ongoing feature selection".

 

We graciously acknowledge the support of the IAPR in providing the cash prizes for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards.  In addition, John Tsotsos and Hong Zhang were each presented with a CIPPRS research and service award.  We congratulate them on their outstanding research achievements and contributions to the vision and robotics communities in Canada.

 

CRV 2006 featured invited talks from three internationally recognized scientists -- Jana Kosecka from George Mason University, Yann LeCun from New York University, and John Leonard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

This year, we were pleased to add a special session on Video Processing for Security (VP4S-06), organized by Dmitry Gorodnichy at the National Research Council and Lijun Yin from SUNY at Binghamton.

 

The organization of a conference is a task that requires the collaboration of many people. We personally would like to thank warmly all members of the CRV 2006 program committee. Without their help and dedication it would not be possible to produce this proceedings of high-quality papers in such a short time frame. Their effort deserves special thanks as the turnaround time between submissions and decisions was only three weeks. We would like to thank John Barron at the University of Western Ontario for his tireless guidance and assistance, and CIPPRS President Gregory Dudek for additional time and support. Special acknowledgements go to the Canadian Space Agency and Simon Fraser University, whose support permitted our organizing efforts.

 

Finally, we would like to thank all authors who submitted their papers, no matter whether their papers were accepted or not.  Their contributions made CRV 2006 an enjoyable and stimulating conference, and we look forward to seeing all of you at CRV 2007 in Montreal!

 Conference Report:  CRV 2006