Guest Editors’ Introduction to the SpecialSection on Award Winning Papers from the

IEEE CS Conference on Computer Vision andPattern Recognition (CVPR)Kim Boyer, Fellow, IEEE, Mubarak Shah, Fellow, IEEE, and

Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, Senior Member, IEEE

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WE are pleased to present this special section on theaward-winning papers from the IEEE Computer

Society Conference on Computer Vision and PatternRecognition (CVPR) 2008, held in Anchorage, Alaska,23-28 June 2008. CVPR has been a flagship conferencerepresenting the state of the art in the field of computervision and pattern recognition for more than two decades.The CVPR 2008 conference received roughly 1,600 submis-sions, the highest in its history. A program committee of474 members and 34 area chairs selected 62 papers for oralpresentation (3.8 percent). A separate awards committeeconsisting of six senior researchers chose eight papers forawards, using information derived from the reviews andthe nominations offered by program committee membersand area chairs. The program chairs agreed with thecommittee’s choices for the various categories. The bestpapers in this special section are those selected for the bestoverall papers and best student papers among the oralpresentations. The authors of these papers were invited tosubmit extended versions for journal consideration. Thejournal submissions were subjected to the standard,rigorous TPAMI peer review process and were eachaccepted after relatively minor revisions.

The papers you will find in this special section are:

. O. Woodford, I. Reid, P. Torr, and A. Fitzgibbon,“Global Stereo Reconstruction under Second-OrderSmoothness Priors.” Winner of the Best Paper prize.This paper presents a method of stereo reconstruc-tion using second-order priors on the smoothness of3D surfaces to better model typical scenes. Theresulting optimization is shown to be tractable.

. C.H. Lampert, M.B. Blaschko, and T. Hoffman,“Efficient Subwindow Search: A Branch and Bound

Framework for Object Localization.” Winner of theBest Paper prize. This paper presents a practicalmethod of localizing objects using the branch-and-bound formalism. A large reduction in location searchis shown while still ensuring no false negatives.

. B. Kulis, P. Jain, and K. Grauman, “Fast SimilaritySearch for Learned Metrics.” Winner of the BestStudent Paper prize. The paper presents a scalableimage search using learned metrics by encoding thelearned metric parameterization into randomizedlocality-sensitive hash functions leading to im-proved accuracy.

. K. Ni, A. Kannan, A. Criminisi, and J. Winn,“Epitomic Location Recognition.” Best Student Pa-per runner-up. This paper presents a method ofrecognizing location classes using the epitomerepresentation to capture the variations in appear-ance and shapes of a collection of images taken froma location.

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to our

Awards Committee: Eric Grimson (chair), Rama Chellappa,

Zhengyou Zhang, Luc Van Gool, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and

Jan-Olof Eklundh for their service.In addition to the best papers from CVPR 2008, we

would like to mention the Longuet-Higgins Prize winners,

as selected by a special committee of three top researchers.

This prize honors those papers from CVPR 1998 having the

most influence on the field over the last ten years. The

committee identified an initial list of candidates from the

most cited CVPR 1998 papers using multiple online citation

sources. After deliberating on the relative merits of the most

cited papers, they chose the following winners:

. H. Schneiderman and T. Kanade, “ProbabilisticModeling of Local Appearance and Spatial Relation-ships for Object Recognition.” This paper repre-sented a significant advance in object recognitionthrough probabilistic modeling and multiple-viewtraining, yielding a state-of-the-art face detectiontechnique.

. C. Bregler and J. Malik, “Tracking People with Twistsand Exponential Maps.” This was seen as an inspiredapplication of kinematic modeling techniques fromrobotics to the challenge of tracking people in

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, VOL. 31, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2009 2113

. K. Boyer is with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and SystemsEngineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th St./JEC 6049, Troy,NY 12180. E-mail: kim@ecse.rpi.edu.

. M. Shah is with School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816.E-mail: shah@cs.ucf.edu.

. T. Syeda-Mahmood is with the IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 HarryRoad, San Jose, CA 95120. E-mail: stf@almaden.ibm.com.

For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:tpami@computer.org.

0162-8828/09/$25.00 � 2009 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society

motion from a single camera view, including amemorable model-based analysis of the Muybridgemotion study videos.

We would like to thank the Longuet-Higgins PrizeCommittee, Tomaso Poggio, Andrew Blake, and DemetriTerzopoulos, for their service. It was both a pleasure and anhonor to be entrusted with assembling the program ofCVPR 2008 on behalf of our scientific community, and weare pleased to offer these articles representing the best art inthe field from 2008. We hope you will enjoy reading theseextended versions of the best papers from CVPR 2008.

Kim BoyerMubarak ShahTanveer Syeda-MahmoodGuest Editors

Kim Boyer received the BSEE (with distinction),MSEE, and PhD degrees, all in electricalengineering, from Purdue University in 1976,1977, and 1986, respectively. He is head of theDepartment of Electrical, Computer, and Sys-tems Engineering at Rensselaer PolytechnicInstitute. From 1977 through 1981, he was withBell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey; from1981 through 1983, he was with ComsatLaboratories, Clarksburg, Maryland. From

1986-2007, he was with the Department of Electrical and ComputerEngineering, The Ohio State University. He is a fellow of the IEEE, afellow of the IAPR, and a former IEEE Computer Society DistinguishedSpeaker. Dr. Boyer is also a National Academies Jefferson ScienceFellow at the US Department of State, spending 2006-2007 as SeniorScience Advisor to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. While atthe State Department, he studied the impact of technological innovationon economic development in scientifically lagging and scientificallydeveloping countries. He also developed policy recommendations forthe use of science and engineering as instruments of diplomacy. Heretains his fellowship as a consultant on science and technology policyfor the State Department. Dr. Boyer’s research interests include allaspects of computer vision and medical image analysis, includingperceptual organization, structural analysis, graph theoretical methods,stereopsis in weakly constrained environments, optimal feature extrac-tion, large modelbases, and robust methods. His current researchactivities include mapping the surface of the dynamic prelens tear filmfrom interferometric video and intelligent illumination control forphotoxicity mitigation in live cell imaging. Dr. Boyer is treasurer of theInternational Association for Pattern Recognition, as well as a USdelegate to the Governing Board. He is a former associate editor of theIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, areaeditor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding, associate editor ofMachine Vision and Applications, chair of the first two IEEE ComputerSociety Workshops on Perceptual Organization, was a charter memberof the DARPA IUE Technical Advisory Committee, and was a member ofthe initial ORD RADIUS Technical Oversight Committee. With KuntalSengupta, he won the Siemens Best Paper Award at CVPR ’93. In 1995,a student team co-directed by Professor Boyer won the InternationalUnmanned Ground Vehicle Competition for its vision-guided Autono-mous Robotic Transporter. In 2002, he was a program chair forComputer Vision and Robotics at ICPR, Quebec. He is a former chair ofthe IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysisand Machine Intelligence. He was the keynote speaker for the 2004SIBGRAPI conference in Curitiba, Brazil. He was a program chair forCVPR ’08 in Anchorage and is technical chair for both ICPR ’10 inIstanbul, Turkey, and ICPR ’12 in Tsukuba, Japan. Dr. Boyer haspublished five books and more than 100 scientific papers. He haslectured in nearly 30 countries around the world. His books includeComputing Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision (World Scien-tific, 1994, with Sudeep Sarkar), Perceptual Organization for ArtificialVision Systems (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, with SudeepSarkar), and Robust Range Image Registration: Using Genetic Algo-rithms and the Surface Interpenetration Measure (2005, with LucianoSilva and Olga Bellon).

Mubarak Shah the Agere Chair Professor ofComputer Science, is the founding director ofthe Computer Visions Lab at the University ofCentral Florida (UCF). He is a coauthor of threebooks (Motion-Based Recognition (1997) andVideo Registration (2003), and Automated Multi-Camera Surveillance: Algorithms and Practice(2008)), all published by Springer. Dr. Shah is afellow of the IEEE, IAPR, and SPIE. In 2006, hewas awarded a Pegasus Professor award, the

highest award at UCF, given to a faculty member who has made asignificant impact on the university, has made an extraordinarycontribution to the university community, and has demonstratedexcellence in teaching, research, and service. He was an IEEEDistinguished Visitor speaker for 1997-2000 and received the IEEEOutstanding Engineering Educator Award in 1997. He received theHarris Corporations Engineering Achievement Award in 1999, theTOKTEN awards from UNDP in 1995, 1997, and 2000; TeachingIncentive Program award in 1995 and 2003, Research Incentive Awardin 2003, Millionaires Club awards in 2005 and 2006, UniversityDistinguished Researcher award in 2007, honorable mention for theICCV ’05 Where Am I? Challenge Problem, and was nominated for thebest paper award at the ACM Multimedia Conference in 2005. He is aneditor of an international book series on video computing; editor-in-chiefof Machine Vision and Applications, and an associate editor of ACMComputing Surveys. He was an associate editor of the IEEETransactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and a guesteditor of the special issue of the International Journal of Computer Visionon video computing.

Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood graduated from theMassachusetts Institue of Technology ArtificialIntelligence Lab in 1993 with the PhD degree incomputer science. She is a research manager atthe IBM Almaden Research Center, where sheheads a program on multimodal mining forhealthcare data. She worked as a research staffmember at the Xerox Webster Research Center,Webster, New York, before joining IBM in 1998.Dr. Syeda-Mahmood led the image indexing

program at Xerox Research and was one of the early originators of thefield of content-based image and video retrieval. Currently, she isworking on applications of content-based retrieval in healthcare. Overthe past 25 years, her research interests have been in a variety ofareas relating to artificial intelligence, including computer vision, imageand video databases, medical image analysis, bioinformatics, andsignal processing. She has more than 100 refereed publications andmore than 40 issued patents. Dr. Syeda-Mahmood has chairednumerous workshops and conferences including several early work-shops that helped established the field of content-based retrieval andevent recognition (Event ’01-’04). She was the program cochair ofCVPR ’08. She has received several gold medals for academicexcellence, including the Sir Akber Hyderi Gold Medal from OsmaniaUniversity for undergraduate education. She received the prestigiousIBM fellowship during graduate school. She has received numerousawards for outstanding contributions to IBM Research over the years.She is a senior member of the IEEE.

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