ICIAP

ICIAP is a conference organized every two years by the GIRPR, the Italian group of researchers affiliated with the IAPR. The aim of these conferences is to bring together researchers working on image analysis, image processing and pattern recognition from around the world.

ICIAP2009 maintained the wide-spectrum connotation of the previous editions. With this edition, we tried to find a unifying thread underlying the works presented. A cross-cutting concern for the various problems (analysis, classification, learning) and for the various application domains that are of interest to our community is the evaluation and comparison of performance. In pattern recognition this is more often than not a hard task because of problems like the lack of standard, widely available databases, or the difficulty in defining a set of common performance indices suitable for all applications. Thus, we emphasized this aspect in the ICIAP2009 program.

The technical program included 107 papers (chosen from 168 submissions), divided into 12 plenary oral sessions (36 papers) and two poster sessions (71 papers). The conference was attended by 152 participants (87 from Italy and 65 from other countries).

The program also included three invited talks by David Stork, IAPR Fellow (Ricoh Innovations, USA), Bogdan Gabrys (Bournemouth University, UK), and Stan Matwin (University of Ottawa, Canada). For the latter two, the talks were organized in an unusual way, to conform to the ICIAP2009 general theme of “comparison”: the two speakers presented a talk on the same topic as seen from their different point of views, with Bogdan Gabrys proposing a Pattern Recognition approach and Stan Matwin a Machine Learning approach. A stimulating comparison between the two approaches was made possible by the coordination and moderation by Floriana Esposito.

Within the general framework of comparison and performance evaluation, ICIAP2009 also hosted the ﬁrst edition of the Fingerprint Liveness Detection Contest (LivDet2009), organized by Fabio Roli IAPR Fellow, Stephanie Schuckers and Gian Luca Marcialis. The results of the contest were presented in a special contest session.

Also, in relation to the performance evaluation theme, ICIAP2009 included a demo session, in order to give both researchers and private companies an opportunity to show the actual working of their proposed systems.

The first day of the conference two tutorials were offered, on 3D Video Processing for Immersive 3D Videoconferencing (by Oliver Scheer) and on Human-centered Vision Systems (by Hamid Aghajan and Nicu Sebe).

During the conference, the Caianiello Prize, in memory of Prof. E. Caianiello, was awarded to the best paper by a young author, as in the previous editions. The winner of this edition was Roberto Toldo, with the paper Automatic estimation of the inlier threshold in robust multiple structures fitting. Also, a prize sponsored by IAPR was awarded to the best paper presented at the conference. The winners of this prize were Shengping Xia and Edwin Hancock, IAPR Fellow, with the paper Learning Class Specific Graph Prototypes.

The social program of the conference included a Welcome Cocktail on the terrace of the Lloyd’s Baia Hotel, located atop a steep cliff overlooking the sea. The Gala Dinner was held in the beautiful town of Ravello, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. The dinner was preceded by a visit to the spectacular gardens of Villa Rufolo, the place where Richard Wagner found ispiration for his Parsifal. During the dinner, the GIRPR President, Gabriella Sanniti di Baja, announced that the next ICIAP, in 2011, will be held in Ravenna and will be organized by Prof. Giuseppe Maino.

Finally, but not least important, during the conference a special session was held to commemorate the achievements of our estimated colleague Prof. Vito Di Gesù, who left us last March. Prof. Di Gesù was always an active and important presence in the GIRPR community.

Conference Report: ICIAP 2009

Report prepared by the General and Program Chairs