Foreword

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to BMVC 2008 in Leeds. The conference continues to grow in strength, and this year we received 256 submissions. The international standing of the conference is reflected in the growing number of submissions from outside the UK, and in the international membership of the programme committee.

The task of reviewing was distributed to 96 reviewers, each of whom reviewed an average of 8 papers. The final selection took place at a meeting of the 22 area chairs on 16 June 2008 at the University of Leeds. Of the 256 papers submitted, 32 were selected for oral presentation and 89 for poster presentation. We gratefully acknowledge all the hard work of the reviewers and area chairs in reaching their decisions in a rigourous and timely fashion. We are particularly pleased to be able to recognise the essential role of the reviewers by awarding a "highly commended reviewer" prize for the first time at BMVC.

We are honoured to have two very distinguished invited speakers, Cordelia Schmid from INRIA, and Ramin Zabih from Cornell University. We are equally pleased to host an invited tutorial by Phil Torr from Oxford-Brookes University.

We are very grateful to all the organisations that generously sponsored the conference: the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Irisys, Microsoft Research, Springer UK, and the BMVA.

Our thanks also go to members of the organising committee responsible for local arrangements: Hannah Dee and Derek Magee. Teresa Honore and Judi Drew provided invaluable help in handling registration. We would also like to thank the chairs of the previous conferences for their advice and assistance, particularly Abhir Bhalerao, Nasir Rajpoot, Bob Fisher, Mike Chantler, William Clocksin and Andrew Fitzgibbon. We would finally like to thank the staff and PhD students in the Computer Vision group at the University of Leeds for their help during the conference week.

We hope that you find the conference stimulating and informative, enjoy Leeds, and leave energised with new ideas for the academic year ahead.

Mark Everingham, Chris Needham and Roberto Fraile
Leeds, August 2008