CRV 2005 was held May 9-11 in Victoria, British Columbia. Organized by the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS), this IAPR sponsored event brought together researchers in vision, pattern recognition, medical imaging and robotics from across Canada and around the world. CRV, which was formally known as Vision Interface (VI), is co-located annually with Graphics Interface and Artificial Intelligence and has been gathering momentum as a first-rate vision conference over the past few years. Conference co-chairs Robert Sim from the University of British Columbia and Ioannis Rekleitis from the Canadian Space Agency observed that paper submissions were up significantly. "We've seen an increase in submissions of 31% over last year, and we think this is a positive sign, both for the conference and the community at large." said Dr. Sim. Dr. Rekleitis further noted, "We're also seeing increased international involvement, indicating increased recognition outside Canada".
The conference featured three days of single-track oral presentations with a parallel poster session. A special session on Intelligent Systems featured the best student paper, "Analysis of Selected Player Actions in Selected Hockey Game Situations" by Fahong Li and Robert Woodham of the University of British Columbia and the best paper award was given to Christian Bauckhage and John Tsotsos (York University) and Frank Bunn (StressCam Operations and Systems) for their work entitled "Detecting Abnormal Gait", a vision system for categorizing human behaviour. The slate of internationally recognized invited speakers included Baba Vemuri from the University of Florida, Dieter Fox from the University of Washington, and David Forsyth from the University of Illinois and UC Berkeley. Dr Fox presented his award winning work on probabilistic robotics, opening a new dimension of robotics-themed research highlighted by CRV.
The final day of the conference wrapped up with a workshop on face processing in video, organized by Dr. Dmitry Gorodnichy of the National Research Council of Canada and Aleix Martinez of Ohio State University. This work brought together several international researchers in video processing and human activity recognition.
"We're very excited by the renewed energy and direction of this conference." said CIPPRS president Gregory Dudek of McGill University. At the conference banquet Dr. Dudek presented an award for research excellence and service to the community to two prominent Canadian researchers: Professor James Little of the University of British Columbia and Professor Michael Jenkin of York University. "We're very grateful for their service and the recognition they've brought to the society through their outstanding research records." said Dr. Dudek.
CRV 2006 will be held June 7-9 next year in historic Quebec City.
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