WIAMIS 2008 proceedings available at IEEE Computer Society Digital Library

WIAMIS 2008 proceedings available at IEEE Computer Society Digital Library.

Presumably last WIAMIS'08 blog entry...

Some pictures from WIAMIS'08 have been posted on [1] and there you will find a link to some more pictures ... enjoy!

Note that at some point in time www.wiamis2008.org will disappear but the content will be kept on [2].

Thanks again for attending WIAMIS'09 and see you next year in London for WIAMIS'09 [3].
(on behalf of the organization committee)

[1] http://www.wiamis2008.org/pics.html
[2] http://wiamis2008.itec.uni-klu.ac.at
[3] http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/

PDFs of WIAMIS'08 keynotes

The PDFs of the three keynotes have been made available through the Web site. They are accessible via http://www.wiamis2008.org/invitedTalks.html.

Thank you for attending WIAMIS 2008!!!

Group picture at Magdalensberg during the social event

Impressions from the Industry Session

(from left to right) John R. Smith (moderator), Paulo Villegas, Visvanathan Ramesh, Bernhard Feiten, Mark Pfeiffer, and Touradj Ebrahimi

Poster Session, M3R, and ADVISE Special Sessions

Here are some further pictures from WIAMIS 2008 ...

Poster Session ...

Poster Session cont'd

Special Session: M3R

Special Session: ADVISE

John R. Smith: Unleashing Video Search

Some pictures taken during John R. Smith's talk entitled "Unleashing Video Search":

John R. Smith: Unleashing Video Search

The audience is listening carefully...

John in action ;-)

WIAMIS 2008 Welcome Reception

Some impressions from yesterday's welcome reception can be found here. Thanks to Oge Marques for making them available.

WIAMIS 2008 just started ...

Here are some first impressions from WIAMIS 2008 opening:

Me, opening the workshop ...

Workshop attendees...

Keynote given by Horst Bischof

Weather Forecast for WIAMIS 2008

The overall weather forecast for WIAMIS 2008 is a mixture of sun and clouds with temperatures up to 23°C. The detailed weather forecast is currently as follows:

• Wednesday: warm and sunny with a few scattered clouds, highs up to 20°C.
• Thursday: warm and even more sunny but some clouds expected in the afternoon, highs up to 21°C.
• Friday: sunny with highs up to 23°C but with an increasing chance (30%) of thunderstorms in the afternoon.
  

Industry Session

Title: Multimedia Content Analysis and Semantic Adaptation

When: Friday, May 9, 2008, 10:30 - 12:30
Where: HS B

Panel discussion with the following panelists

• John R. Smith, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA (Moderator)
• Paulo Villegas, Telefonica I+D, Spain
• Bernhard Feiten, T-Systems, Germany
• Visvanathan Ramesh, Siemens Princeton, USA
• Mark Pfeiffer, SAIL LABS Technology
• Touradj Ebrahimi, EPFL & EMITALL Surveillance
  

Network Information

WiFi-enabled (Wireless Fidelity Standard) network access is provided throughout the workshop location. Additionally, a limited number of Ethernet plugs (RJ45) is available to participants in public places throughout the university campus. Note: please bring your cable with you if you would like to make use of this service.

All network access methods mentioned above require authentication at the ZID-Connect system of the Klagenfurt University.

Further information can be found here: http://www.wiamis2008.org/network.html

WIAMIS 2009, 6-8 May 2009, London, UK

The International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) is one of the main international fora for the presentation and discussion of the latest technological advances in interactive multimedia services.

The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry working in all areas of image, video and audio applications, with a special focus on analysis.

After Louvain (1997), Berlin (1999), Tampere (2001), London (2003), Lisboa (2004), Montreux (2005), Incheon (2006), and Santorini (2007), Klagenfurt (2008) WIAMIS 2009 will be held in London.

Important Dates:

• Proposal for Special Session: November 21, 2008
• Paper Submission: December 1, 2008
• Notification of Acceptance: January 16, 2009
• Camera-ready Papers: February 06, 2009

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Multimedia content analysis and understanding
• Content-based browsing, indexing and retrieval of images, video and audio
• 2D/3D feature extraction
• Advanced descriptors and similarity metrics for audio and video
• Relevance feedback and learning systems
• Segmentation of objects in 2D/3D image sequences
• Identification and tracking of regions in scenes
• Voice/audio assisted video segmentation
• Analysis for coding efficiency and increased error resilience
• Analysis and understanding tools for content adaptation
• Multimedia content adaptation tools, transcoding and transmoding
• Content summarization and personalization strategies
• End-to-end quality of service support for Universal Multimedia Access
• Semantic mapping and ontologies
• Multimedia analysis for advanced applications
• Multimedia analysis hardware and middleware
• Multimedia standards, e.g., MPEG-7 (incl. Query Format), MPEG-21, etc.

Further information: http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/

WIAMIS Social Events

The organization committee invites all registered participants of the workshop to the following social events:

• Wed, May 7, 2008: Welcome reception at Maria Loretto Castle (Schloss Maria Loretto) on the peninsula Loretto of Lake Wörthersee. The place offers an amazing view of Lake Wörthersee toward the west, which should be most exciting on a sunny evening...
  

• Thu, May 8, 2008: Workshop dinner at Mount Magdalena (Magdalensberg). From the mountain top toward the south, you can enjoy a wonderful view of the Klagenfurt Basin and the Karawanken, a scenic chain of mountains on the Slovenian border...

Please check out the program for further details.

Early-bird registration deadline is approaching

The early-bird registration deadline is on March 31, 2008. From April 1, 2008 regular registration fees apply. Please consult the registration Web site for details.

Furthermore, we would appreciate receiving your hotel reservation as soon as possible. Please note that in June the UEFA EURO 2008™ is taking place in Klagenfurt which may affect the room situation in May also. Thus, the earlier one books the easier/cheaper it will be to get the hotel/room of one's choice. Although we have reserved a block of rooms in appropriate hotels close to the university, we have to successively reduce this number from March 31 onwards if not used by workshop participants. In other words, please make your travel arrangements for WIAMIS 2008 soon…

In case you have any questions about the available hotels/rooms, please contact the responsible persons.

Presenter Information

• Oral presentations: Please prepare your presentations including time for questions and discussions, e.g., 20 min for the actual presentation and 5-10* min for questions and discussions.
• Poster presentations: maximum size for posters is width = 118 cm and height = 145 cm. Pins are provided by the host.
  

* ... depending on the actual size of the actual presentation slot. See the program for details.

WIAMIS 2008 Program Available!

The program for the 9th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) to be held in Klagenfurt, Austria from May 7-9, 2008 is now available under http://www.wiamis2008.org/program.html.

Keynotes at WIAMIS 2008

WIAMIS 2008 is pleased the following keynote speaker:

• Horst Bischof, TU Graz, Austria: Robust Person Detection for Surveillance using Online learning
• John R. Smith, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA: Unleashing Video Search
• Jens-Rainer Ohm, RWTH Aachen, Germany: Recent, current and future developments in video coding

Robust Person Detection for Surveillance using Online learning

Recently, there has been considerable amount of research in methods for person detection. This talk will focus on methods for person detection in a surveillance setting (known environment). We will demonstrate that in this setting one can build robust and highly reliable person detectors by using on-line learning methods. In particular, I will first discuss "conservative learning"
which is able to learn a person detector without any hand labelling effort. As a second example I will discuss a recently developed grid based person detector.

The basic idea is to considerably simplify the detection problem by considering individual image locations separately. Therefore, we can use simple adaptive classifiers which are trained on-line. Due to the reduced complexity we can use a simple update strategy that requires only a few positive samples and is stable by design. This is an essential property for real world applications which require operation for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During the talk we will illustrate our results on video sequences and standard benchmark databases.

Unleashed Video Search

Video is rapidly becoming a regular part of our digital lives. However, its tremendous growth is increasing users’ expectations that video will be as easy to search as text. Unfortunately, users are still finding it difficult to find relevant content. And today’s solutions are not keeping pace on problems ranging from video search to content classification to automatic filtering. In this talk we describe recent techniques that leverage the computer’s ability to effectively analyze visual features of video and apply statistical machine learning techniques to classify video scenes automatically. We examine related efforts on the modeling of large video semantic spaces and review public evaluations such as TRECVID, which are greatly facilitating research and development on video retrieval. We discuss the role of MPEG-7 as a way to store metadata generated for video in a fully standards-based searchable representation. Overall, we show how these approaches together go a long way to truly unleash video search.

Recent, current and future developments in video coding

Most recent attention in development of video coding algorithms has been devoted to the ITU-T Rec.H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 Advanced Video Coding standard. Recent and current extensions to this standard include developments for professional applications, highly-efficient scalable video coding and multi-view video coding. Finally, digital video over various networks, going for higher and higher resolutions, is becoming reality.

While this technology is progressing and further optimizations are sought, new challenges appear at the horizon. New types of displays include 3D capabilities, requiring for generation of additional view perspectives beyond available camera positions. Cameras and displays are coming up with permanently increasing frame rates and sizes. The tremendous amount of different applications for digital video requires additional flexibility and reconfigurability of devices. And last not least, increased compression efficiency (meaning rate reduction versus processing cost) is again becoming more important with ever increasing numbers of pixels to be transmitted. The talk will focus on possible solutions to these challenges and discuss the maturity they currently have.

Camera Ready Paper Submission via IEEE CPS

For final, camera ready, paper submission please visit the IEEE Conference Publishing Service (CPS) for WIAMIS 2008.

Please be aware that the publication of any paper in the WIAMIS 2008 Proceedings requires that at least one of the authors must register at a non-student rate before Feb. 18, 2008. Please visit the registration page for registration.

Further details under http://www.wiamis2008.org/submission.html.

PS: EDAS submission is closed and please do NOT submit your camera ready paper through EDAS, use IEEE CPS instead.

Online Registration Available

The registration to WIAMIS 2008 will be handled through our secure online registration service which is available under https://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/wiamis2008/registration/.

In case you experience any issues during registration please feel free to contact us by email via registration(at)wiamis2008(dot)org.

Review results available NOW!

The review results are available NOW! Please check your e-mailbox or visit http://edas.info.

John R. Smith as keynote speaker for WIAMIS 2008 confirmed!

John R. Smith from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center completes the list of keynote speaker for WIAMIS 2008.

For a brief biography of all keynote speaker visit http://www.wiamis2008.org/invitedTalks.html.

Review results available

To all authors: the review results are available.

Important Dates:

• Proposal for Special Session: November 23, 2007
• Paper Submission: December 21, 2007
• Review Results: January 25, 2008 ***extended***
• Submission of Camera-ready Papers: February 15, 2008