IWCIAâ??08 is the twelfth of a series of international meetings on combinatorial image analysis. It will take place in Buffalo, NY, USA, April 7-9, 2008. Previous meetings were held in Paris (France) 1991, Ube (Japan) 1992, Washington DC (USA) 1994, Lyon (France) 1995, Hiroshima (Japan) 1997, Madras (India) 1999, Caen (France, 2000), Philadelphia (USA, 2001), Palermo (Italy, 2003), Auckland (New Zealand, 2004) and Berlin (Germany, 2006).

Image analysis is a scientific discipline providing theoretical foundations and methods for solving problems appearing in a wide range of areas, as diverse as medicine, robotics, defense, and security. As a rule, the processed data are discrete; therefore, the "discrete approach" to image analysis appears to be a natural one and has an increasing importance. It is based on studying combinatorial properties of the considered digital data sets. Combinatorial image analysis often features various advantages (in terms of efficiency and accuracy) over the more traditional approaches based on continuous models requiring numeric computation.

The scientific program of the workshop will consist of keynote addresses, contributed papers presented in a single track, and posters.

An opening talk will be given by the special guest of IWCIA'08, Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman (Nobel Laureate, President of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute). Keynote talks will be given by Prof. Jake K. Aggarwal, University of Texas at Austin, Prof. Polina Golland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Prof. Arie E. Kaufman, SUNY Stony Brook. A closing talk will be given by Prof. Gabor T. Herman, Graduate Center, the City University of New York.

The workshop proceedings will be published in the Springerâ??s "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series.

LNCS logo Springer logo

After the Workshop, the authors of the best ranked papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their works for publication in a special issue of Pattern Recognition (Elsevier).

Topics

The Workshop will be a forum for current research on topics such as the following:

* Combinatorial problems in the discrete plane and space related to image analysis; lattice polygons and polytopes
* Discrete/combinatorial geometry and topology and their use in image analysis
* Digital geometry of curves and surfaces
* Tilings and patterns; combinatorial pattern matching
* Image representation, segmentation, grouping, and reconstruction
* Methods for image compression
* Discrete tomography
* Applications of integer programming, linear programming, and computational geometry to problems of image analysis
* Parallel architectures and algorithms for image analysis
* Fuzzy and stochastic image analysis
* Grammars and models for image or scene analysis and recognition; cellular automata
* Mathematical morphology and its applications to image analysis
* Applications in medical imaging, biometrics, and others


Prospective authors are invited to submit a paper on some of the above or closely related topics. The submitted work should contain only results that are unpublished and not included in other work considered for publication elsewhere. Thus by submitting a paper the author(s) warrant that neither it nor any other paper with essentially the same technical content has been published or submitted for publication anywhere else.

The emphasis of this Workshop is on theory. Therefore, considerable mathematical depth of the submitted works is expected. The authors should also make clear how their work is related to problems of image analysis. In order to be accepted, a submitted paper will have to reach very high standards by satisfying serious evaluation criteria. Each paper will be thoroughly reviewed by three referees. Double-blind review process ensures maximal objectiveness.

Most of the papers will be presented orally. There will also be a Poster Session at which some of the papers will be presented as posters. All the papers will be included in the workshop proceedings published in a volume of Springerâ??s LNCS series.


* Special Track on Applications

In addition to the theoretical research papers, a special track on applications will take place as a part of IWCIAâ??08. Authors are invited to submit original papers describing in detail working computer systems for image analysis. The algorithms should mostly be based on discrete/combinatorial approaches. Theoretical contributions are appreciated but not required. The criteria for acceptance will be originality, efficiency and overall performance of the computer system that is demonstrated by extensive experimental work. During a presentation the authors are expected to demonstrate the work of the software. Industry representatives will be welcome to these presentations.

The accepted papers will be published by Balkema - Francis and Taylor (pending approval). After the Workshop, the authors of the best ranked papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their works for publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology (Wiley) and possibly in special issues of other journals.