CIVR

Welcome to the 2008 ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR), held on July 7-9, 2008 at Sheraton Fallsview Hotel and Conference Centre in the scenic city of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

ACM CIVR is the dedicated annual professional meeting for communicating the state-of-the-art in image and video retrieval research and technology. As in previous years, starting with the first CIVR workshop in 2002 and continuing on to the first ACM-branded CIVR in 2007, the conference seeks to illuminate the state of the art in image and video retrieval between researchers and practitioners throughout the world and provide an international forum for the discussion of challenges in the fields of image and video retrieval. In a nutshell, ACM CIVR covers all aspects of image and video retrieval: from underlying technologies and theories, to applications and practice.

The exciting three-day conference consists of three major parts: the regular and special sessions tracks on Monday and Tuesday, a full Practitioner's Day on Wednesday, and the VideoOlympics exhibition showcasing live-action video search and retrieval on Tuesday evening.

The conference comprises several different technical program elements, each with separate submissions and reviewing: regular track full papers, special sessions full papers, a panel, and Video Olympics. We are excited to host two research keynote presentations by Prof. Jiawei Han of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Prof. Alberto Del Bimbo of University of Florence, who will give unique perspectives from their research work in academia. In addition, one high-profile application keynote will be given by Dr. Edward Chang of Google Research China.

The program co-chairs for ACM CIVR 2007 are Alan Hanjalic, Mohan Kankanhalli, and Ivan Lee, who were responsible, along with a program committee of 70 members, for selecting the full paper program for the regular paper track. The regular paper track received 123 paper submissions. Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a single-blind review process. The program chairs went through a careful deliberation process over the course of one week to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral or poster presentations in the conference program. With further re-evaluation of both novelty and impact, this rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 15 oral presentations and 42 poster presentations. This represents an acceptance rate of 12 percent for oral and 34% overall. We heartily thank the program co-chairs and the program committee members for their outstanding and dedicated work.

To highlight important and emerging topics, we significantly boosted the number of special sessions from one in 2007 to three in the research track and one in the practitioner track this year. The four special sessions received a total of 27 submissions, including 18 invited by the special session organizers and nine from the open submission. Due to the high quality of these submissions, two papers were accepted to the regular track in addition to the 20 papers accepted into the four special sessions. These 20 special session papers will be oral presentations at the conference. Many thanks to the special sessions co-chairs Lexing Xie and Qi Tian for the excellent job identifying and coordinating the various special topics, and the individual special session organizers for their great effort.

The VideoOlympics exhibition is back on popular demand after its huge success in CIVR 2007. This exhibition event (note that we do not call it a competition) will run on the Tuesday evening, and we encourage all attendees to come and cheer on the brave researchers who will put on a show with their latest and greatest technologies. The VideoOlympics chairs did a wonderful job to recruit the participation of 13 teams, significantly more than the first time.