Foreword
We are delighted to welcome you to the 24th British Machine Vision Conference, and in particular once again to the University of Bristol, where BMVC is held for the second time in its 24-year history. The conference is at the peak of its strength and considered as one of the top events in the computer vision community's calendar. This year it has received the most number of papers it has ever received 439 submissions. Although "British" is in the title, 86% of the accepted submissions are from overseas, reflecting the irrefragable importance and status of the conference internationally. Using the first author's affiliation, 14% of the accepted papers are from a UK-based institute, 44% from Europe (excluding UK), 21% from Asia, 19% from North America and 2% from Australia.
To facilitate the process of peer reviewing such a considerable number of papers, we depended on a team of 225 referees, each of whom reviewed at least 4 papers, and 2 Area Chairs (ACs) per paper, with each AC responsible for at least 15 papers. In total, 49 ACs took part in the reviewing procedure. Following a discussion process, where necessary, involving the reviewers and ACs of each paper, consensus was reached and final decisions were made. The results are the papers you see before you comprising 29 podium presentations and 102 poster presentations. This represents a 7% podium acceptance rate and 30% overall acceptance rate. We would like to thank all the authors, referees, and ACs for their hours of work and contributions to this conference. This was not the end of the road for the ACs as many of them were also involved in selecting the best papers for our various prizes. Four prizes will be awarded, three of which are traditional prizes for the best Science paper, best Industrial paper, and the best Poster. This year we are also awarding a prize in memory of our nonpareil colleague and computer vision pioneer, Professor Maria Petrou (1953-2012). We are grateful to Qualcomm, Dyson, Microsoft, HP, the IET and all other sponsors for their financial support of the conference.
We are thrilled to have two distinguished scholars as invited speakers, Prof. Andrew Zisserman from the University of Oxford and Prof. Frank Dellaert from Georgia Institute of Technology, and two esteemed tutorial presenters, Dr. Andreas Krause from ETH Zurich and Dr. Adam Coates from Stanford University. In the Friday PhD Student Workshop, we are pleased to have two highly prominent invited speakers, Dr. Gabriel Brostow from University College London and Dr. Edward Rosten from Computer Vision Consulting. We thank all of our presenters in turn for their time and endeavour.
BMVC2013 has been organised by members of the Visual Information Laboratory in the Merchant Venturers School of Engineering at the University of Bristol. We would like to sincerely thank Antonina Timofejeva for her relentless and efficient handling of the conference administration and secretariat duties. We are also indebted to a number of others who have contributed enormously to the organisation of the conference, Jose Martinez-Carranza for organising the workshop and all our valued helpers: Pui Anantrasirichai, Geoffory Daniels, Austin Gregg-Smith, Anthony Glynn, Osian Haines, David Hanwell, Adeline Paiement, Toby Perrett, Roz Sandwell, Laszlo Talas and Richard Vigars. We also received invaluable support from the organisers of the previous BMVC at Surrey University, namely, John Collomosse, Krystian Mikolajczyk, Richard Bowden, and Helen Cooper, who we thank gratefully.
BMVC and Bristol have much to offer in their own imitable ways, and we hope that you find the conference stimulating and informative, and the City of Bristol with its history and sights enjoyable and rewarding.
Tilo Burghardt, Dima Damen, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas, Majid Mirmehdi
Bristol, September 2013