Editorial

Special Issue: British Machine Vision Conference 1994

This Special Edition of /muge und Vision Computing

journal represents a collection of some of the best submitted papers together with the two invited lectures presented at the Fifth British Machine Vision Conference. The conference was held at the University

of York between 13-16 September 1994, and attracted approximately I50 delegates. The call for papers in April 1994 was overwhelming, resulting in over 174 submissions. Due to the limitations of the programme it was possible to accommodate only 45 papers as podium presentations, with a further 32 papers presented as posters. This special issue represents a further review

and distillation of what was already a necessarily high quality set of papers. In addition to being reviewed by

three members of the programme committee and being ranked in the top 10% of submissions, the papers

presented here have subsequently been enhanced by their authors and subjected to a further rigorous review process to pass the acceptability criteria for Imuge und

Vision Computing.

The invited lectures were ‘Relief: pictorial and otherwise’ by Professor Jan Koenderink of Utrecht

University, The Netherlands, and ‘Optimization

approaches to . constraint satisfaction problems in machine vision’ by Professor Kazuhiko Yamamoto of ETL, Japan. In many ways, these two papers reflected some of the natural themes of this year’s conference. Professor Koenderink’s paper addresses fundamental issues iri shape representation and perception, while Professor Yamamoto’s paper underlines the use of optimization techniques in intermediate level scene interpretation. Another si’gnificant theme was identified in the pre-conference tutorial on ‘Statistical methods in vision’. This highly informative and very well attended event was presented by Professor Josef Kittler of Surrey University and Professor Chris Taylor of Manchester University.

The papers selected to appear in this special issue naturally fell into the three thematic strands described above. These span the topics of shape representation, matching and recognition. together with the use of statistical methods in vision. As in the past, the BMVC Programme Committee awarded a prize for scientific novelty. In a very tight competition, the award was made jointly to the papers of Cham and Cipolla and Sato and Cipolla.

Under the heading of shape representation. the idea of symmetry stimulated some of the best papers in the

conference. Here the prize winning paper by Cham and Cipolla addresses the topic of how skewed symmetry can be assessed using local measures. Pillow, Utcke and Zisserman, on the other hand, exploit the symmetry-set to establish an invariant representation for generalized cylinders. At the structural level, Wright, Cipolla and Giblin describe a new distance transform that can potentially capture more expressive information

concerning object symmetry. Examples of physically-based models of deformable

shape provided a number of very strong papers. Shen and Hogg describe a method for 3D shape recovery from 2D images which operates under the assumption

of symmetric shape in the direction of motion. Elms and Illingworth develop a technique for recognizing noisy character patterns using hidden Markov models. Lanitis, Taylor and Cootes describe an extensive evaluation of point distribution models in the domain

of face recognition. Extending the point distribution paradigm, Sozou, Cootes, Taylor and Di Mauro demonstrate some benefits of adopting a shape defor- mation process that is polynomial rather than linear in its parameter updating.

The idea of capturing and exploiting statistical information in the matching phase was evident at various levels of representation. At the feature-level, Cootes and Taylor describe a novel way of combining statistical and physically based models of deformable

shape. Adopting a symbolic perspective, Wilson, Evans and Hancock also demonstrate an effective synthesis of methodologies by showing how probabilistic optimiza- tion methods and classical constraint filtering ideas may

be used in a symbiotic way to match noisy relational models in SAR data. At the accumulator level, Riocreux, Thacker and Yates demonstrate how pairwise feature histograms can be regarded as a

complete shape representation in the sense of being invertible. Drawing on the active contour paradigm, Ivins and Porrill describe a new energy process that couples snake-dynamics to the statistical properties of textured image regions. Finally, in the second prize winning paper. Sato and Cipolla describe a novel approach to motion correspondence which relies on computing the parameters of affne transformation from changes in texture statistics.

It has been a great pleasure to write this editorial introduction to what represents a snapshot of some of the best computer vision research currently taking place

0262~8856/$09.50 I(” 1995Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Image and Vision Computing Volume 13 Number 5 June 1995 319

Editorial

in the UK. The papers present the unique flavour of UK activity in this area. As a final point, it is interesting and very illuminating to note that much of the work published in this special issue represents the research of graduate students, some of whom are still in their first and second years of research. To produce work of journal quality at such an early stage represents a significant achievement. It speaks volumes not only for

the continuing quality of postgraduate research training provided by UK universities in what is proving to be an increasingly austere climate, but also of the high calibre

of young researchers attracted to this vibrant and stimulating subject.

Edwin Hancock University of York, UK

320 Image and Vision Computing Volume 13 Number 5 June 1995