With diverse applications ranging from crime prevention and detection, vehicle driver assistance, laparoscopic surgery to measuring the thickness of chocolate on biscuits, technological advances in image processing and computer vision affect almost every aspect of our lives, according to Professor Brian Scotney, Director of the University’s Computer Science Research Institute.

The Research Institute this week hosted the 2008 International Machine Vision and Image Processing (IMVIP) Conference in Portrush attracting theoreticians, practitioners, industrialists and academics from the numerous related disciplines involved in the processing and analysis of image-based information. Among those present were delegates from Ireland and UK, Australia, Belarus, China, France, India, New Zealand, USA and Venezuela.

Machine Vision and Image Processing are key research area for the Computer Science Research Institute and the aim of IMVIP 2008 was to emphasise both the theoretical research results and practical engineering experience in all areas of machine vision.

According to Professor Scotney, the conference was an ideal forum for postgraduate students to meet and discuss their research with internationally renowned experts.

“Biomedical imaging was a strong theme of this year’s conference - supported by generous sponsorship from the Health and Social Care Research and Development Office and Old Bushmills Distillery Co. Ltd.  Biomedical imaging is an area of significant research interest for Ulster and researchers are working in collaboration with the HSC Trusts on a number of  oncology projects that are particularly focused on the development of assistive tools for early diagnosis."

One of the keynote speakers at 20008 IMVIP was Professor Roy Davies, Professor of Machine Vision at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has been to the forefront of international research into image processing and computer vision for over 25 years. During this time he says that machine vision and image processing have developed exponentially opening up many exciting new applications, which in turn have created some technical and ethical challenges.

He said that while some of the applications for machine vision and image processing predicted in the 1980s gave rise to false hope and even a negative backlash, a much more realistic approach is being adopted today.

“While it is very difficult to predict the nature of technology, developing systems to interpret data correctly is one of the many technical challenges facing scientists today. For example, an everyday application of image processing is the use of CCTV surveillance cameras in crime prevention and detection. The cameras can capture very clear images but it can be time consuming to view the images recorded. Time is a very precious commodity so we need to find ways to use technology to interpret the images.”

The other keynote speakers are the conference were Professor Philip Torr, a previous winner of the prestigious IEEE Marr prize which is the highest honour in Machine Vision and Professor Scott Acton, Director of the University of Virginia’s Image and Video Analysis (VIVA) laboratory and a leading international authority on biomedical imaging. 

IMVIP 2008, the conference of the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society, which is a member body of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, was co-chaired by Professor Bryan Scotney, Director of the Computer Science Research Institute and Senior Computer Science lecturer Dr Philip Morrow. Professor Scotney and Dr Morrow are President and secretary respectively of the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society. This year’s conference is the 12th in the IMVIP series, with the first held at the University of Ulster's Magee Campus in 1997.

The conference proceedings are published by IEEE Computer Society, and will be archived electronically through the IEEE Computer Science Digital Library (CSDL) and IEEE-XploreTM. The proceedings will also be indexed through IEE INSPEC, EI (Compendex), and SCI (ISI).

For further information, please see the conference website:

http://www.compeng.ulster.ac.uk/events/imvip2008/

For further information, please contact:

David Young
Telephone: 028 90366074
Email: David Young