Foreword

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to York for the 27th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC). The University of York recently celebrated its 50th birthday (in 2013) and has grown rapidly since its founding. It now home to more than 16,000 students. York is a campus University, sited in parkland and famous for its lakes and waterfowl. The conference is sited on the Heslington West campus on the outskirts of the historic city of York.

BMVC is one of the top events in the Computer Vision conference calendar and must now be considered as a truly international event with the majority of papers coming from outside the UK. This year, BMVC attracted a total of 365 valid submissions. Although this is lower that the record submissions level of recent years, it still represents a very active and healthy conference. The paper review process was unchanged from previous BMVCs, and we recruited more than 300 reviewers to process the papers. All papers received three reviews and each paper was then handled by two area chairs from our pool of 50 subject experts. Accepted papers required strong support from both reviewers and area chairs. We would like to thank all the reviewers and area chairs for their hard work and prompt responses.

Of the 365 submissions, just 144 were accepted for presentation in BMVC 2016, which is a 39% acceptance rate. Only the very highest quality papers were selected for oral presentation, with 38 papers gaining a podium spot, or 10% of the submissions. The accepted papers represent a truly international research community, with 18% of the papers from the UK, 36% from the EU excluding the UK, 22% from Asia, 20% from North America, and 4% from the rest of the world. As is now standard for BMVC, the proceedings are published entirely online, without the use of USB drives, for environmental reasons.

BMVC has always has strong links with industry, and again we are very grateful to our industrial sponsors for supporting the event. ARM, Disney Research, OSRAM, Ocado technology, HP, the IET, Edmund Optics and DigitalBridge kindly supported the main conference. Our thanks also go to NVIDIA, CRC press and Springer for sponsoring the best paper prizes.

We have put together an interesting programme of invited speakers and are delighted to welcome Dr Abhijeet Ghosh, Professor Katsushi Ikeuchi and Professor Raquel Urtasun to the conference. Dr Ghosh will deliver the tutorial on appearance modelling, and Profs. Ikeuchi and Urtasun will give the two keynote presentations in the main conference.

BMVC 2016 has been organised by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. The organisation of such a large conference would not be possible without the help of many people, and we are grateful to everyone who has contributed. Particular thanks must go to Bob French for his help in sorting out the logistical details and the student helpers for their support during the conference. We would also like to thank Xianghua Xie for his support and advice as the outgoing BMVC chair, and the BMVA committee for their extremely helpful suggestions and advice.

We hope you find BMVC 2016 in York both and enjoyable and valuable experience.