It is with great pleasure and pride that Bristol University welcomes BMVC and its participants at the start of the new Millenium! Hopefully, the year 2000 will herald the start of rapid progress and exciting developments in the area of Computer Vision.
Computer Vision is more prevalent and popular than ever before and we are proud to have had nearly one hundred and fifty papers submitted (with just over a third from overseas) in a year of numerous, related conferences, such as ICPR, CVPR, ICIP, EUSIPCO, ECCV, etc. The review process was certainly tough and resulted in 38 oral and 40 poster papers.
The quality of papers at this conference is, as usual, very high. The main programme is marked by our two very distinguished invited speakers: Prof. Eric Grimson, from MIT, USA, who will speak on Computer Vision Methods for Image Guided Surgery, and Prof. Luc Van Gool, from KTH, Belgium who will speak on Wide Baseline Stereo Matching based on Local, Affinely Invariant Regions. BMVC2000 is further complemented by a pre-conference tutorial session by Prof. Andrew Blake of Microsoft Research, UK, on Probabilistic Inference and Learning in Computer Vision. We welcome all three wholeheartedly.
The CD accompanying these proceedings contains the papers for all BMVC conferences since 1996.
As in previous years, the "Industry Day" is intended as a key feature to encourage cooperation and new liasons between academia and industry. The United Kingdom Industrial Vision Association (UKIVA) will award a prize to the best of any work demonstrated at the conference. There will also be other prizes such as those sponsored by Computer Recognition Systems Ltd. and Hewlett Packard Research Labs. The UKIVA is also holding a one-day Technical Workshop on Industry Day entitled Using Colour Information in Machine Vision.
Many people have helped in preparing and organising the conference. Especial thanks go to our untiring Executive Assistant Mrs. Ann Prowse, and to Colin Dalton for help with the graphics. We are grateful to the members of the Programme Review Committee for their monumental task. Dr. Tony Pridmore, the previous BMVC chairman, deserves a very special mention for all his help and useful tips. BMVC2000 has also received support from local industry in the form of sponsorship from Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol. We are thankful for their donation and enthusiasm in supporting BMVC2000.
we hope you enjoy the conference, enjoy each other's company, and leave with lots of fresh ideas!
Majid Mirmehdi and Barry Thomas