One of the projects we've been working on, called Hive, is a framework for distributed vision processing, allowing reusable modules to be connected together. Modules can be devices such as cameras or algorithms e.g. face tracking. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras at Stanford University in September.

Over 100 people attended the keynote by AMD Research's Dong Ping Zhang at the 1st Workshop on User-Centred Computer Vision as part of the 2013 Winter Vision Meetings. The workshop had an attendance between 25 and 50 for the excellent technical talks.

We hope to see everyone at the next UCCV in Steamboat Springs in March 2014!

The 1st Workshop on Developer-Centred Computer Vision at ACCV was a great success, with 45 attendees and some great talks. The proceedings can be found here: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-37410-4/page/2/. We hope to hold it again in the near future!

The submission sites for DCCV 2012 and UCCV 2013 are open at:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/DCCV2012/
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/UCCV2013/
These workshops focus on research and technology for providing computer vision to users (User-Centred Computer Vision) and mainstream developers (Developer-Centred Computer Vision), and are both taking place at premier computer vision events - DCCV is held in conjunction with the Asian Conference on Computer Vision in Daejeon, Korea in November 2012, and UCCV is held as a part of the Winter Vision Meetings in Tampa, U.S.A. in January 2013.

OpenVL's first industry outing at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit was very successful! AFDS was an excellent event, showcasing some great technology, with a huge focus on cameras and applications for user-content creation. A set of summary slides will be posted soon covering the main points of our presentation. If you have access to AFDS-D, you can review our session slides or video (PL-4189). If you would like more information, please contact us!

The first workshop on Developer-Centred Computer Vision (DCCV) will be held as part of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision in Daejeon, South Korea in November 2012. The workshop is being organised by the OpenVL team to discuss the state of the art in computer vision access, focussing on software developers and the APIs, interfaces and environments available to them. Please consider submitting a paper and/or attending the workshop!

The IEEE Winter Vision Meetings (and the Workshop on User-Centred Computer Vision) will take place in Clearwater Beach, Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. from 15th to 17th January 2013. The meetings will also include the Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision, the Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance and the Workshop on Robot Vision. A single passport-style registration will be used for access to all workshop sessions.

The schedule for ADFS has been announced - OpenVL will be presented in the Programming Languages and Models (PL) session at 1415 on Tuesday 12th June 2012 in room E/F of the Hyatt Regency, Bellevue. The session ID is PL-4189, and the title of the session is "OpenVL: A High-Level Developer Interface to Computer Vision".

We have been invited to speak at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, 11-14 June 2012 in Bellevue, Washington, U.S.A. We will be presenting OpenVL, our developer abstraction for computer vision: we will cover the central concepts used in our high-level developer interface to computer vision, present examples of the abstraction applied to specific problems such as image segmentation and object detection, and provide a demonstration of the technology in action. If you are planning to attend AFDS, please come and try the demo!

We are pleased to announce our sponsorship of the 1st Workshop on User-Centred Computer Vision (UCCV 2013) will be held as part of the IEEE Winter Vision Meetings in Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. in January 2013. UCCV is a one day workshop intended to provide a forum to discuss the creation of intuitive, interactive and accessible computer vision technologies. The workshop will be focussed on research from academia and industry in the fields of computer vision and human-computer interaction.

The majority of researchers in computer vision focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in algorithms and methods; there is very little focus on how the state-of-the-art can be usefully presented to the majority of people. Research is required to provide new technology to address the shortcomings in the usability of computer vision.

The workshop will bring together researchers from academia and industry in the fields of computer vision and human-computer interaction to discuss the state-of-the-art in HCI for Vision. We invite the submission of original, high quality research papers on user-centred, interactive or accessible computer vision. Areas of interest include (but not limited to):

• Vision systems/frameworks designed for use by non-experts
• Visual or Integrated Development Environments for vision system design
• High-level abstractions of vision algorithms
• Algorithm/Task/User level API design
• Detection/tracking/recognition of a physical person as input to an interactive system
• Interpretation of user input such as descriptions, sketches, images or video
• Automatic or interactive algorithm selection
• Automatic or interactive task selection
• Automatic or interactive parameter tuning for vision algorithms
• Using computer vision to exploit meaningful user interaction
• Case studies on user-centred computer vision
• Interactive/supervised correction of weaknesses in the current state-of-the-art in computer vision
• Evaluation of vision interfaces (e.g. through user studies)

GRAND 2012 (2nd-4th May, Montréal, Canada) will showcase a multi-disciplinary program of research and innovation across the broad spectrum of digital media topics and issues, with presentations from researchers across Canada. Gregor Miller is co-chair for the Research Notes session.

A demonstration of OpenVL will be available, showcasing examples of segmentation, object detection, correspondence search, image registration and optical flow.

This year we have published various papers on OpenVL and its segmentation framework:

• OpenVL: Abstracting Vision Tasks Using a Segment-Based Language Model
• OpenVL: An Abstraction for Developer-Friendly Computer Vision
• Developer-Friendly Segmentation using OpenVL, a High-Level Task-Based Abstraction
• OpenVL: A Task-Based Abstraction for Developer-Friendly Computer Vision

We will be releasing the OpenVL framework for segmentation for personal and academic use in the near future!

Through the creation of our computer vision abstraction we have developed a set of guidelines along the way to help steer our design decisions. We believe these guidelines will be of some use to others in the vision community, so will be presenting a few of them at the Human-Computer Interaction workshop held in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in Barcelona in November.

SIGGRAPH is coming to Vancouver this year! We will be attending to present the latest research on our computer vision shader language, which is part of our OpenVL project. The presentation will be part of the poster session, and the poster will be on display throughout the conference.

As part of our on-going effort to provide an abstraction over computer vision algorithms we will be presenting a conceptual decomposition of computer vision into the axioms of vision and a problem-based taxonomy of image registration at the Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision in St. John's, NL in May.

The Winter Vision Meetings is a collection of workshops held annually. The next group of meetings will be held in January 2011 in Kona, Hawaii, and will host:

• The Workshop on Person-Oriented Vision (POV)
• The Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
• The Workshop on Motion and Video Computing (WMVC)

We will be presenting our language model for face detection at POV and automated classification of image registration problems at WACV.

As part of the Winter Vision Meetings I am organising the Workshop on Person-Oriented Vision which will be held in Kona, Hawaii on the 5th of January 2011. I intend the workshop to highlight ongoing research in accessible and interactive computer vision, as well as provide an opportunity for discussions on new directions for the field. We are looking to publish work on the following topics:

• Transforming CV problems to exploit meaningful user interaction
• High-level abstractions of vision algorithms
• Automatic or interactive algorithm selection based on user input
• Detection/tracking/recognition of a physical person as input to an interactive system
• Interpretation of user input such as descriptions, sketches, images or video
• Automatic or interactive parameter tuning for vision algorithms
• Case studies on "Person-Oriented" CV
• Vision systems designed for use by non-experts
• Interactive/supervised correction of weaknesses in the current state-of-the-art

The deadline for submissions is the 26th August (abstracts 19th August), using the WACV paper format.

Our latest addition to the Unified Camera Framework is an addressing mechanism (turning every camera into a network camera), improved driver model and networked camera management tools. This work detailing the entire framework will be presented at the International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras in Atlanta in August.

As part of our work to create a Rapid Vision Application Development (RVAD) framework, we are developing an image retrieval abstraction called the Unified Camera Framework. We detail the current system and our initial findings in our paper Uniform Image and Camera Access and will present the work at the Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision, part of the Winter Vision Meetings, in Snowbird, Utah in December.

Our vision system development framework, VU, provides a new way to organise vision systems and a novel classification of the computer vision problem as a whole. Using our well-defined components for camera access, image conversion and data transport, users can construct vision systems rapidly and easily, to capture and process data. This framework will be presented at the Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval in San Diego in December.

We have recently developed an automatic image registration system for stitching and stacking problems, which works with low or high frequency images as well as image sets which vary in intensity (high dynamic range - HDR) and focus. This system will be presented at the International Conference on Vision Systems in Liege in October.

We have developed a suite of example vision systems to demonstrate the power of Hive:

• Improved accuracy real-time face detection
• Quality of view analysis from multiple cameras
• Multiple camera calibration using external sensors
• Augmented reality and visualisation

This work will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications in Lisbon in February 2009.

At the International Conference on Vision Systems this year we will be presenting our latest research into a general abstraction for computer vision, OpenVL. OpenCV and similar systems provide sophisticated computer vision methods directly to the user, which requires a lot of knowledge and experience to use effectively. We have developed a methodology which provides the user with a mechanism to execute the required vision algorithm through a higher level interface, allowing a much larger audience to employ computer vision methods.

We are very happy to announce the first release of OpenVL! This version provides a high-level interface to image segmentation. Results can be visualised using the included VisionGL library (for testing etc.), or extracted to use for your own applications.

The release contains C++ static library binaries for OS X (Xcode/GCC), Windows (Visual Studio 2010) and Linux (GCC), as well as all the necessary headers, and an example application.

You can download it here: OpenVL-v0.1a-20130701

Please note that this is research software, so expect lots of bugs and missing features. Feedback is appreciated, so please let us know if you find a problem or would like to suggest an addition.

We are also looking for academic and industry collaborations to help develop OpenVL - contact us if you're interested!

Release Notes

*** 2013/07/01 OpenVL v0.1a ***

First release

• Image segmentation
• Desktop implementation (designed for use on desktop/laptop systems)
• OSX-Xcode, Windows-VisualStudio and Linux-GCC supported