CAIP11

This year’s CAIP was held in beautiful Sevilla in Spain. It took place in the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Infomática of Sevilla University. Following the tradition of the CAIP conference series it featured three days of single-track oral and poster presentations.

The conference had more than 300 submissions of which 150 were selected for presentation in oral and poster sessions. Highlights were certainly the two invited talks. On Monday, Facundo Memoli from Stanford University talked about stability and classification of algorithms related to metric structures on databases. Equally interesting, but from a historical perspective, the other invited speaker, Peter Sturm (INRIA, Grenoble, Rhône-Alpes, France), talked on Wednesday about an ongoing historical study of geometric computer vision.

The flavor of cross-disciplinarity was carried on in the conference itself. Presentation of novel results in the fields of computer vision and image processing 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. Methodologies 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 could be defined, then it was 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 for the participants to get together and gave them a chance to get to know some of the long history of the city of Seville. On the first evening, we were taken on a guided tour exploring the old centre of the city (Barrio de Santa Cruz) and Reales Alcázares. The CAIP2011 Gala Dinner was held on Tuesday, August 30, at the Abades Restaurant.

The 2011 edition of the CAIP conference series was a high quality event conveying a good overview on the current research in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition to all participants in a pleasant and communicative environment. The main sponsors of CAIP were the Universidad de Sevilla, Ministerio Español de Educación y Ciencias, and IAPR.

The next CAIP will be held 2013 in York, United Kingdom.

Conference Report: CAIP 2011

Report prepared by Pedro Real Jurado (Spain)