Foreword

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to London for the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)! This is the 28th BMVC since its inception in 1990, and it's the second time in London. The conference is hosted at the Royal Geographical Society of London (RGS). RGS was founded in 1830, overlooking Imperial College London, Kensington Gardens, and the Royal Albert Hall. It has been a key associate and supporter of many explorers includingDarwin, Livingstone, Stanley, Scott, Shackleton, Hunt and Hillary.

BMVC is one of the top events in the Computer Vision conference calendar, and a truly international event, with the majority of papers coming from outside the UK. This year, BMVC attracted a total of 635 full paper submissions, which is the highest number in the history of BMVC.

This year, we introduced a few changes to the reviewing process. Despite a very tight schedulebounded by ICCV deadlines from one side and UK immigration visas from the other, we ran a full reviewing process that included bidding for papers by ACs and reviewers, as well as reviewer suggestions by ACs, author rebuttals, and reviewer and AC discussions with the help of CMT and TPMS systems. There were 550 reviewers and 41 area chairs involved in this process, generously donating their time. The Program Chairs made an effort to assign papers on similar topics to the same set of Area Chairs (ACs), so that related papers could be compared directly. To achieve this, 70 papers were pre-assigned to each AC with the help of the Toronto Paper Matching System. ACs then went over the paper titles and abstracts and bid on those they would like to handle. Using all of this information as input, ACs received a final assignment of around 30 papers, for which they provided ranked lists of candidate reviewers. ACs were asked to suggest candidate reviewers who were experts in the topic, had a broad view of the field, were reliable, and could provide high quality reviews. Their choices were additionally guided by the reviewers' bids (the process followed for reviewer bidding was similar to that used for ACs). Oral papers were selected based on the reviews, AC consolidation reports, ranking in the ACs' batches, and suitability of the content for a general audience. We would like to thank all the reviewers and area chairs for their hard work and prompt responses!

Of the 635 submissions, just 188 were accepted for presentation in BMVC 2017, which is a 30\% acceptance rate. Of the accepted papers, 36 were accepted as oral for a podium spot. We also introduced spotlight sessions to promote 20 further outstanding papers. The accepted papers represent a truly international research community, with 15\% of the papers from the UK, 24\% from Europe excluding the UK, 34\% from Asia, 27\% from North America, and 1 paper from Egypt. As is now standard for many top conferences, the proceedings are published entirely online.

We have put together an interesting programme and are delighted to welcome Richard Szeliski and Pietro Perona to the conference as keynote speakers, Lourdes Agapito, Shimon Whiteson, Andreas Geiger and Vincent Lepetit as tutorial speakers, as well as Jamie Shotton as workshops keynote speaker. BMVC has always had strong links with industry, and again we are very grateful to our industrial sponsors for supporting the event. Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft Research, Facebook Oculus, Amazon, SCAPE, Snap and Google. Gold Sponsors: Toshiba, Qualcomm, Intel, Twitter, and Slamcore. Silver Sponsors: Cosmonio, Osram, Ocado, Sengled, Toyota Research Institute, IET The Institution of Engineering and Technology, and Adobe.

Last but not least, we wish to thank all members of the Organizing Committee, the Area Chairs, reviewers, emergency reviewers, authors, and the CMT and TPMS teams for the immense amount of hard work and professionalism that has gone into making BMVC 2017 a first rate conference.

We hope you find BMVC 2017 in London both an enjoyable and productive experience.