Computer and Robot Vision

The 2007 Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) just finished. It is an annual conference sponsored by the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS, which I happen to be the president of, so be aware this is not objective). CRV took place in Montreal combined with AI 2007, Graphics Interface and the Precarn conference. From all accounts the conference combination worked well and there is a desire to hold all four conferences together again next year where the venue will be Windsor, Ontario. Having Precarn in the mix had the conference overall a bit more professional and upscale, and people were nervous about possible increased costs, but it all worked out nicely. Windsor is certain to be the venue for the next AI/GI/CRV, but Precarn still needs to decide if they will join.

Speakers included Michael Black who spoke about Markov Random Fields (MRF's) for image restoration. In addition to showing of some of his own ideas Michael provided a nice overview of the area and discussed methods to avoid explicit computation of the partition function. This material was especially appealing to me since it is related to the research of my former student Abril Torres (Luz-Abril Torres-Mendez) who worked with me on the recovery and restoration of range images using MRF's. Invited speakers included Martial Hebert and Larry Matthies from CMU and JPL respectively, who each also gave very nice talks on image motion analysis and on vision based navigation and scene understanding. I sadly missed most of Larry's talk due to an administrative meeting, but the people who talk to me about it were very enthusiastic, which is no surprise since Mars landing applications are always good and Larry delivers a consistenly great presentation. Martial actually gave 2 different long talks, both of which included a nice restrospective introduction as well as some cool very recent results (some of which were only archieved the week of the conference and have not yet appeared in print).

The one minor downer was an expensive banquet at the Marriott that featured a really absymally tough dry capon (chicken). I rarely focus on food, but this thing was truly memorable.

Other features of the conference were a trade show and an open house at the McGill Research Center for Intelligent Machines (CIM). Both had pretty good attendance and seemed to go over quite well.

(Read more about Abril's work on MRF's here.)