Welcome to the 10th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG13) in Shanghai, China. The conference is the premier world conference on vision-based facial and body gesture modeling, analysis, and recognition. Since its first meeting in Zurich, the conference has been held nine times throughout the world. At its tenth meeting, the conference is held for the first time in Shanghai, China. Shanghai is the economic and financial center of China. Many of China’s prestigious universities and companies are located in Shanghai. The conference is held at the Majesty Plaza Hotel, which is ideally located in the center of the city and is within walking distance to the city’s major attractions and shopping centers.

We received over 300 paper submissions in total for the main conference. From these submissions, 36 were accepted for oral presentations and 68 were accepted for poster presentations, an acceptance rate of about 35%. Only submissions with high novelty and convincing comparisons to the state of the art methods were accepted. We have assembled a main conference program that comprises 3 keynote presentations, 12 single-track oral sessions including 3 special sessions on “Frontiers in FG,” and 3 poster sessions. The posters are also summarized in spotlight presentations. The conference also features workshops, tutorials, demonstrations, exhibitions, and a Doctoral Consortium. We are happy to report that about 20 graduate students from all over the world are participating in the Doctoral Consortium. Besides technical meetings, the conference also features technical tours of local companies and universities as well as social tours of local attractions.

We are honored to welcome three keynote speakers who have distinguished themselves as leading innovators in FG research.  Professor Gregory Abowd is an internationally recognized leader in human-centered applications of mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies.  Professor Judee K. Burgoon is a world-renowned expert on nonverbal and verbal communication, deception and computer-mediated communication.  Professor Jessica Hodgins is leading at the forefront of research on computer graphics, animation, and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion.

A large event such as FG cannot take place without the contributions from many people. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the area chairs and the reviewers, who put significant time and efforts into assembling the excellent program. We are also grateful for other conference organizers who worked diligently and effectively to solicit an outstanding collection of workshops, tutorials, special sessions, sponsorships, demos and exhibits and to publicize the conference, to handle the finances, and to deal with the many details involved in putting together a first-rate conference. We would also like to express our thanks to the FG steering committee for their advice and guidance. We, in particular, would like to express our gratitude to our local chair, Professor Baoliang Lu for the great support he has provided.

This year, we received an unprecedented amount of sponsorships from a wide range of sponsors including private companies, university, and governmental agencies. We express our sincere gratitude for their generous support. Their support demonstrates the growing reputation of FG among private companies and governmental agencies. Their support also allows us to provide additional services to the conference attendees and enables the participation of a large number of graduate students in the Doctoral Consortium.

Last but not least, we wish to thank all of the authors who are sharing research results and progress through their conference and workshop papers and demos this week; their work is the reason the conference exists. We invite all attendees to actively participate in the conference activities, and thoroughly enjoy the conference. Welcome to Shanghai!

Rama Chellappa, Xilin Chen, and Qiang Ji
FG 2013 General Co-Chairs

Maja Pantic, Stan Sclaroff, and Lijun Yin
FG 2013 Technical Program Co-Chairs