TC18-Newsletter-April 2007 ===================================================== Contents: ========= 1. TC-18 Chairs 2. DGCI 2008 in Lyon 3. Report on DGCI 2006 in Szeged 4. Spread the TC18 and the Discrete Geometry activies 5. Web site updates ===================================================== 1) TC 18 Chairs --------------- As announced a couple of months ago, the TC18 governing board is now composed of three members: - Stina Svensson (vice-chair): in charge of the relationship with DGCI. Indeed, a member of the TC18 governing board is now in the DGCI Steering Committee. - Reneta Barneva (vice-chair): in charge of the TC18 International affairs. - David Coeurjolly (chair): relationships with the IAPR and overall organization. Keep in mind that this governing board should be updated every two years (synchronized with the IAPR Steering Committee meeting in the ICPR conferences). 2) DGCI 2008 in Lyon -------------------- The next TC18 main conference, DGCI 2008, will held in Lyon in April. Some the details concerning the conference have already been sent to you in a previous TC18 message with the first call for papers (see http://liris.cnrs.fr/dgci2008). In these paragraphs, we would like to give you some details about the internal organization of this event. During the DGCI Steering Committee (SC) meetings in Szeged, several decisions have been taken to improve again the overall quality of the conference: - Make the Program Committee members involved in all the steps of the reviewing process (paper allotment, final decisions,...), and reduced it; - enhance the "offline" tasks (pre-selection of reviewers, topic assignments,...). Based on these suggestions, the DGCI 2008 Organization Committee, in coordination with the SC, decided to slightly modify the organization structures while keeping the DGCI philosophy: - Update of the conference topics in order to disambiguate some points. - Reduction of the program committee: the idea is to associate one or two PC member(s) to DGCI topics. Hence, during the reviewing process, PC members of a given topic will participate to the process of the submitted papers in the same topic. - New Reviewing Committee: researchers grouped into categories according to the new DGCI topics who carry out the reviews of submitted papers. Note that this committee is updated continuously, and will also be updated according the submissions. All committees are available on the DGCI 2008 web page. Isabelle Sivignon - David Coeurjolly, LIRIS, Lyon, France 3) Report on DGCI2006 in Szeged - TC18 main conference ------------------------------------------------------ The 13th International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery Conference (DGCI 2006) was held in Szeged, Hungary, 25 to 27 October, 2006. DGCI is the main conference of IAPR Technical Committee on Discrete Geometry (TC18, http://www.tc18.org/) and is held approximately every 18th month. The 2006 edition of DGCI was organized by the Department of Image Processing and Computer Graphics, University of Szeged, Hungary, with an organizing committee consisting of Attila Kuba, Laszlo G. Nyul, and Kalman Palagyi. The conference venue was at the József Attila Study and Information Centre of the University of Szeged. The conference was sponsored by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). Financial and infrastructural help was also given by Institute of Informatics, University of Szeged. DGCI generally attracts a large number of research contributions from academic and research institutions in the field of discrete geometry. For the 2006 edition, the number of submissions was larger than ever before, which is a clear indication that the impact of the conference is increasing. In total, 99 papers were submitted from all around the world. Of these 99, 55 contributions were accepted - 28 for oral and 27 for poster presentation. All accepted contributions were scheduled in single-track sessions. The oral and poster sessions covered many fascinating topics such as Discrete Geometry, Topology, Image Analysis and Segmentation, Shape Representation, Distance, Discrete Tomography, Skeletonization, and Surfaces and Volumes. The three invited speakers showed some important views on their researches related to the field of discrete imagery: - Jean-Marc Chassery (LIS Laboratory, Grenoble, France) gave a talk on Duality and Geometry Straightness, Characterization and Envelope, - T. Yung Kong (City University of New York, USA) a talk on Minimal Non-Simple and Minimal Non-Cosimple Sets, and - Laszlo Lovasz (Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary) one on Geometric Representations and Algorithms. Note that the slides of the invited lectures are available on the TC18 web page (http://www.tc18.org/events.html#dgci). The conference brought together 93 registered participants from 23 different countries. Hence, not only the number of submissions was larger than ever before, but also the number of participants as well as the number of represented countries. The conference was well organized, the program run smoothly without any problem. The available infrastructure, including the audio/projections, computer equipment, Internet connection, worked according to high standard. Together with the scientific part, there was also a nice and appreciated social program. During the first evening, a rich wine and cheese party was held at the conference site. During the second evening, the participants were guided through the famous Votive Church (Dom) and could also enjoy a nice organ concert. After the guided tour, the gala dinner was held at Fehértói Halászcsárda, a famous fish restaurant nearby the Fehértói landscape protection area. The food as well as the entertainment was very much appreciated among the participants. Proceedings of the conference was published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series (as volume number 4245). At least one special issue is scheduled (Discrete Applied Mathematics). At the gala dinner, it was announced by the chair of the DGCI steering committee Jean-Marc Chassery that the next DGCI conference will be held in Lyon, France, in April 2008 and that it will be organized by the Multiresolution, Discrete and Combinatorial Models Team (M2Disco) (Laboratoire LIRIS, University de Lyon) with David Coeurjolly and Isabelle Sivignon as general co-chair, see http://liris.cnrs.fr/dgci2008. Jean-Marc also pointed out that the aim of the steering committee is to find an organizer from outside France for the edition after Lyon and from outside Europe the edition after that. Finally, I, probably together with the rest of the participants, would like to acknowledge the organizers for the excellent way the conference days were handled, despite the fact that the general chair Attila Kuba could not attend and, further more, to express my condolences for his death just a few days later. Dr Stina Svensson, Centre for Image Analysis, Uppsala, Sweden 4) Spread the TC18 and the Discrete Geometry activies ----------------------------------------------------- Discrete Geometry Community, nowadays represented by IAPR TC 18, is comparatively a small one. Nevertheless, in the last 15 years it has made a significant progress in terms of organizing new research groups in several countries (mainly in Europe), increasing the number of researchers involved and the intensity of research performed. As a result, its reputation is constantly growing. However, in recent years an increasing number of members understand (and express the opinion) that, in order to go further with the above-mentioned achievements, broader dissemination of the ideas of discrete geometry is needed. Moreover, new relationships should be established with leading research centers where discrete geometry is developed. This would also help TC 18 community to refresh its research subjects. In this regard, some recent initiatives will be mentioned in the present report. - Special Track on "Discrete and Computational Geometry and their Applications in Visual Computing" at the Second International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA, November 2006 Although the symposium has only two year history, it quickly developed as an important event in the broad area of visual computing. Its Program Committee includes over 200 scientists from many different countries, and the participants' body is from all over the world. The last proceedings of the symposium occupy two LNCS volumes with over 1800 pages. Many of the papers presented are within the broad scope of discrete geometry and its applications. Eleven special tracks have been organized in the framework of ISVC. The largest one was on "Discrete and Computational Geometry and their Applications in Visual Computing". The track had two sessions. It was organized by V.E. Brimkov and R. Barneva. The following scientists served as PC members: E. Andres, D. Coeurjolly, Isabelle Debled-Rennesson, G. Gamiand, Ch. Fiorio, A. Imiya, and R. Klette. An informal round table was organized among the participants in the special track "Discrete and Computational Geometry and their Applications in Visual Computing" at the International Symposium of Visual Computing, Lake tahoe, Nevada, November 6-8, 2007. The participants informed each other about the current problems they are working on and made a list of the discrete geometry centers they belong to and the main researchers there. - Other forthcoming events related to the TC18 activies: * 8th ISMM (Math. Morphology, Oct. 2007) http://ismm.dpi.inpe.br/2007/ * IWCIA 2008 (April) http://www.cs.fredonia.edu/iwcia08/ * DGCI 2008 (April) http://liris.cnrs.fr/dgci2008/ * ICPR 2008 (December) http://www.icpr2008.org/ Reneta P. Barneva, Professor, Kasling Lecturer, Department of Computer Science State University of New York at Fredonia, USA. 5) Web site updates ------------------- Few changes on the TC18 web pages: - DGCI 2006 invited lecture slides are available: http://www.tc18.org/events.html#dgci - Educational, in the "nD Object and recognition" section, we have added a link to Jean Bernoulli's article (1771) on the periodicity of digital straight lines (in Old French). http://www.tc18.org/subfields/nD_objects/ - Challenges "DPS recognition": source codes have been updated and a subversion (SVN) repository has been created to track the development process. http://www.tc18.org/code_data_set/Challenges/DPSRecognition/