Foreword

It is our great pleasure to welcome all participants of the 26th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) to Swansea. Swansea University is set in a rolling parkland and enjoys a prime position overlooking Swansea Bay, the start of the famously dramatic Gower coastline.

BMVC is one of the top events in the field of Computer Vision and has always maintained a single track format. As its increasing popularity and quality, it has established as a prestigious event on the vision calendar. This year BMVC has attracted a record number of submissions. A total of 553 valid papers were received, which represents just over 25% increase from the last BMVC record achieved in 2013. The majority of the submissions are from overseas, that is 87% of the submissions, reflecting the international status of the conference.

For BMVC 2015, we have substantially expanded the international reviewer pool to 270, prior to the paper submission deadline. As a result, we were able to reduce the average paper load per reviewer to 6.3. Each paper had at least one area chair and in most cases was handled by two area chairs from our team of 54 area chairs. New to this year, we split the borderline rating to borderline accept and borderline reject to help the referees to decide which side they really wish to support. Accepted papers needed strong support from reviewers and area chairs. Papers that require extensive changes, new experiments, further comparisons to existing methods, improved clarity and other changes that would normally require a second review cycle were not accepted. We would like to thank all reviewers and area chairs for their diligent work and prompt responses.

In total, 186 papers are accepted, that is 33% of overall acceptance rate which is in line with recent BMVCs. Among those, 41 papers are selected as oral presentation, i.e. around 7% of the submitted papers that is among the lowest oral acceptance rates of BMVC. BMVC 2015 programme contains the largest number of technical papers since the BMVC inception in 1993. Using the first author’s affiliation, 15% of the accepted papers are from a UK-based institute, 32% from Europe (excluding UK), 27% from Asia, 22% from North America, 3% from South America, 1% from Australia, and 1% from Africa. This year, BMVC publishes its proceedings entirely online, without the use of USB drives for environmental reasons. Three prizes will be selected and awarded at the conference. We also awarded 5 student bursaries to encourage participation, particularly where financial support is needed.

This year, we also introduced changes to the workshop programme. We have moved the student workshop from Friday to Thursday PM, which used to be a free afternoon, so that the conference is more compact. Meanwhile, we have expanded the workshop programme to allow four parallel sessions. These topics that are proposed by the organisers have enriched the conference and further encouraged participation. In total, the four workshops contain 6 keynote speeches and 33 accepted papers.

Up to the late registration deadline, BMVC 2015 has well over 300 registered delegates, which is another record in BMVC series. This year, there are strong interests from the industry to support the BMVC, with 11 sponsors providing financial and in-kind contributions. We are grateful to Movidius, Qualcomm, Microsoft, nVidia, IET, Ocado technology, Google, and other sponsors for their generous support.

We are very honoured to have three distinguished scholars as invited speakers. Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon from Microsoft is going to deliver the conference tutorial on fitting models to data. Prof. Ron Kimmel from Israel Institute of Technology and Prof. Kristen Grauman from University of Texas at Austin are the two keynote speakers at the main conference. We are grateful to their inspiring contributions.

BMVC 2015 has been organised by the Computer Vision and Medical Image Analysis group and members of the Visual Computing group in the Department of Computer Science at the Swansea University. We are indebted to a number of people who have contributed generously to the organisation of the conference: Jingjing Deng, Sue Phillips, Mike Edwards, Julie Pellard, Robert Palmer, Jonathan Jones, David George, James Jones, Joss Whittle, Dean Thomas, and Neil Jenkinson. We thank BMVA executive committee members for their support and in particular Toby Breckon for his time in sorting out various finance matters so promptly. We also received generous support from the organisers of the previous BMVCs at Bristol University and Nottingham University, namely Dima Damen, Majid Mirmehdi, Michel Valstar, Andrew French, Susannah Lydon, and Tony Pridmore.

We sincerely hope you find BMVC 2015 intellectually stimulating, and we also wish you an enjoyable stay at Swansea.