Technical Program Chairs’ Overview

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in Brussels, the world capital of beer and chocolate! Hopefully attending ICIP 2011 will stimulate both your palate as your intellect and will be an exciting, fruitful, and inspiring experience.

This year we have received 2245 paper submissions from 67 countries spread all over the globe. The Asia/Pacific region provided 44.4% of the authors, Europe, the Middle East and Africa 37.0%, North America 15.6%, and Latin America 3.0%.

The organizing committee had all submitted papers subjected to peer evaluation by 1113 volunteers who were selected based on their expertise area. They provided over 7,000 reviews, i.e., an average of about 3.2 per paper. The review process was managed per EDICS domain by 61 Area Chairs who are members of the Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, members of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee, or otherwise leading researchers within the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image Processing community. The Area Chairs monitored the review process and made recommendations for each paper. A total of 889 regular papers (40.6 %) have been accepted and are presented in 48 lectures and 42 poster sessions. We would like to sincerely thank everybody involved in the review process: your individual contributions have shaped the ICIP 2011 program.

The ICIP 2011 technical program includes three plenary lectures addressing the main themes of the conference: human computer interfacing, cultural heritage and astronomy. We are therefore delighted to announce the following plenary lectures at this year’s ICIP conference:

• “Seeing and the Brain”, by Prof. Brian Wandell from Stanford University, USA.
• “Sparsity and Astronomical Data Analysis”, by Dr. Jean-Luc Starck from the Commission for Atomic Energy (CEA), France.
• “Distinguishing the ‘Hand’ of the Master?,” by Prof. Ingrid Daubechies from Duke University, USA.

The conference kicks off on Sunday, 11th September, with 5 tutorials (3 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon). These tutorials were selected from 17 proposals submitted in response to the Call for Tutorials by a team of experts under the guidance of Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran and Dr. Ton Kalker. The evaluation process resulted in the selection of the following state-of-the-art tutorials on vibrant research topics in image processing:

• “Convex Optimization Methods for Image Processing” by Xavier Bresson and Thomas Pock.
• “Image Analysis in Very High Resolution Optical Remote Sensing” by Jocelyn Chanussot.
• “Image and Video Analysis using Local Binary Pattern Variants” by Matti Pietikäinen and Janne Heikkilä.
• “Spatio‐temporal Filtering for Multi‐object Tracking in Image Sequences” by Andrea Cavallaro and Emilio Maggio.
• “ToF (Time of Flight) Depth Sensor Image Processing: from Principle to Applications” by Seungkyu Lee, Albert J.P. Theuwissen, Radu Horaud, Miles Hansard, Hwasup Lim and Seong-Jin Kim.

The ICIP 2011 program also offers 8 special sessions covering key research topics. The special sessions were selected after a meticulous reviews process of 12 submitted special session proposals in response to the Call for Special Sessions under the guidance of the Special Session Chairs, Prof. Edward Delp and Prof. Ferran Marques. Each paper in the special sessions was reviewed by, at least, four reviewers. The ICIP 2011 special sessions and corresponding organizers are:

• “Advances in Motion Representation for Video Coding”, by Thomas Sikora, and Andreas Krutz.
• “Advances in Transforms for Video Coding”, by Marta Mrak, and Robert Cohen.
• “Analysis of Microscopy and Reconstructive Images for Applications in Medicine and Biology”, by Laure Blanc‐Feraud, Dave Burton, Aymeric Histace, Bogdan Matuszewski, Chris Moore, and Frederic Precioso.
• “Astronomy and Cosmology”, by Yves Wiaux.
• “Compression of High-Dimensional Media Data for Interactive Navigation”, by Gene Cheung, Pier Luigi Dragotti, and Vladan Velisavljevic.
• “Distributed Compression: Multimedia Applications”, by Vladimir Stankovic, Lina Stankovic, and Samuel Cheng.
• “Modern Shape from Shading and Beyond”, by Michael Breuß, Ariel Tankus, and Oliver Vogel.
• “Recent Advances in Web-scale Image Annotation”, by Clement Chia Nanyang, Yiqun Hu, and Jinjun Wang.

To recognize top research results, ICIP 2011 includes two types of awards:

• Best Paper Award, supported by Hewlett-Packard. After nomination by the Area Chairs and guided by the reviewers’ scores and comments, the nominated papers have been reevaluated by an independent panel of experts.
• Best Student Paper Awards, supported by Huawei, Barco and Wiley-Blackwell. For these awards the first author needs to be a student upon submission of the paper. ICIP 2011 has followed the process initiated at last year’s ICIP in Hong Kong, highlighting the importance of the paper presentation. Eight Best Student Paper Award candidates have been selected through a review process from a list of 50 top scoring papers nominated by senior researchers.
  The eight nominated papers are invited to present their work in a Best Student Paper Award Special Session. A jury composed by the Awards Chairs will score the candidates by considering all relevant reviewing criteria, including the quality of the oral presentation.

The award process was managed by the Awards Chairs, Prof. Pascal Frossard and Prof. Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu. They will present the awards during the conference banquet.

As Technical Program Chairs, we would like to thank the plenary speakers, tutorials presenters, reviewers, session chairs, and all authors and presenters for their contributions to ICIP 2011. In particular we would like to thank the Area Chairs for their instrumental support for building a high quality ICIP 2011 program. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation for the Destrée Organisation, in particular Nicolas Le Brun and his team, for their support in organizing ICIP 2011.

We look forward to welcoming you in Brussels,