Soatto, Stefano University of California-Los Angeles Frontiers of Vision: A collaborative workshop on Computer Vision and its role in application with broad societal impact
Computer Vision is a relatively young but rapidly evolving field. The academic community is growing rapidly, as measured for instance by the number of submissions to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conferences, which more than tripled since 1998 (submission was 453 in 1998, 466 in 2000, 920 in 2001, 1100 in 2003, 1300 in 2004, and 1500 in 2005). Such a growth is partly fueled by an increased demand for the use of vision in security and monitoring applications, medical imaging, robotics, persistent ISR, etc. A key stepping-stone was also achieved in the mid nineties with the availability of commercial off-the-shelf hardware to acquire and process imaging data in real time, thus enabling an entire new host of applications where vision is to be used as a sensor in the loop of real-time control applications. Vision is coming to play a key role in problems of broad societal and scientific impact from transportation to space, to entertainment, to environmental monitoring, to medicine, and to security. The increasing role that vision plays in applications is also documented by the increased investment by large industrial groups in vision research, from Microsoft to Siemens, General Electric, Mitsubishi, Honda etc.
Despite such a booming trend, the academic and research community remains heavily fragmented. Researchers come to vision from different backgrounds (mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science, neuroscience) and speak different technical languages (from graph theory to partial differential equations to information theory to dynamical systems and control theory). The community is also heavily segmented into sub-areas with few successful attempts to vertically integrate different approaches. Unlike other disciplines that have a common set of analytical tools and speak a unified language or that have a common set of benchmark tasks, Computer Vision remains a collection of separate approaches to separate problems, with no unifying theory, or even rational comparison between different approaches or common experimental benchmarks.
The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for leading researchers to share their views on the future directions in Computer Vision, draw connections from different areas, and propose ways to help improve the impact of the community in applications that have broad societal consequences.
