The third Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis  (IbPRIA'2007 http://ibpria2007.udg.cat) brought together about 200 researchers from more than 20 countries at the beautiful city of Girona, in Spain. This time, the IbPRIA Conference was hosted by the Computer Vision and Robotics Group of the University of Girona, and followed the two successful previous editions hosted by the Universitat de les Illes Balears (2003), and the Institute for Systems and Robotics and the Geo-systems Center of the Instituto Superior Técnico (2005). IbPRIA is an international event co-organized every two years by AERFAI and APRP, the Spanish and Portuguese chapters of the IAPR-International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

A record number of 328 full paper submissions from 27 countries were received. Each of these submissions was reviewed in a blind process by two reviewers. The review assignments were determined by the four General Chairs, and the final decisions were made after the Chairs meeting in Girona, giving an overall acceptance rate of 47.5 percent. Because of the limited size of the conference, we regret that some worthy papers were probably rejected. All the accepted papers are published in the Springer LNCS 4477 and 4478 volumes.

In keeping with the IbPRIA tradition of having a single track of oral presentations, the number of oral papers remained in line with the previous IbPRIA editions, with a total of 48 papers. The number of poster papers was settled to 108.

In addition to presentations by the authors of submitted papers, there were also invited talks presented by three prominent researchers:

· “Know unknowns: Novelty detection in condition monitoring” by Christopher K.I. Williams of University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom;

· “Seeing the invisible and predicting the unexpected” by Michal Irani of The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; and

· “Vision-based SLAM in real-time” by Andrew J. Davison of Imperial College London, United Kingdom.

For the first time, some relevant related events have been scheduled in parallel to the IbPRIA main Conference according to the Call for Tutorials and Workshops: Antonio Torralba from MIT, USA, and Aleix Martínez from Ohio State University, USA, taught relevant tutorials about Object Recognition and Statistical Pattern Recognition, respectively, while “Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Their Applications” workshop and the first edition of the “Spanish Workshop on Biometrics” were successfully developed.

The Best Paper Prize, sponsored by IAPR, was selected out of a short list of 9 papers which received the highest scores during the review process, while the final decision was taken by a Committee of eight experts after attending their oral presentations during the two first days of the IbPRIA'2007 Conference. Finally, two papers were ex-aequo awarded with such prize and a cash prize of 300 Euros each one. Congratulations to the awarded authors for their work!

A highlight of the Conference was also the banquet, which was held in a very nice Catalan restaurant near Girona. As many conference participants assessed, the excellent quality of the food provided by “El Celler de Can Roca” was the perfect apogee of a high quality scientific conference.

Conference Report:  IbPRIA’2007