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Machine Vision of Animals and their Behaviour (MVAB) 2015
BMVC 2015, 10 September, Swansea, UK
http://di.ncl.ac.uk/mvab2015
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A half-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the 26th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2015.

This workshop aims to bring together the computer vision for animals community to present and discuss positions, methods and applications addressing key challenges in this emerging field. Discussions at the workshop will seek to understand challenges and identify opportunities and research directions for academia, industry and government from diverse perspectives, such as animal farming, wildlife study and machine vision with pattern recognition.

The workshop will consist of two keynote talks from agriculture and machine vision, oral presentations and posters. Generous time for Q+A and discussions will be given. The motivation is to stimulate in-depth discussions on this relatively new, emerging trend of computer vision research.

Authors are invited to submit 4-6 page, high-quality papers on positions, methods, applications, and work in progress addressing (but not limited to) the challenges stated below for machine vision of animals and their behaviour. Electronic proceedings will be distributed by the BMVC with DOI indexing.

Challenges of Machine Vision:

Inferring animal behaviour
* Recognition and discrimination of behaviour from reactivity to the environment (e.g., wind, waves).
* Identification of generic 'problems' and classification of specific health and welfare problems.
* Detection of behaviour changes such as change in activity level (including death), social interactions and change in activity type.
* Analysis of natural groupings/phenomena, such as herds and swarms appearing all at once.

Measuring animals
* Identification, tracking and monitoring of individuals in groups.
* Estimation of count, weight, size, shape, gait and dispersion.
* Assessment of variation in groups of animals.
* Classification of different organisms (e.g., by species).
* Inspection of carcass parts.
* Inferring body composition from live animals.

Technical/Application
* Challenging conditions for machine vision, such as frequent changes in lighting and background.
* Challenging environments such as buildings, extensive areas, water systems, deserts, and forests.
* Big data generated from multiple sources.
* Precision livestock farming that addresses sustainability.

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Ilias Kyriazakis, Newcastle University, UK, Professor of Animal Health
Prof. Robert Fisher, University of Edinburgh, UK, Professor of Computer Vision

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: Friday 10 July 2015
- Author notification: Wednesday 29 July 2015
- Author registration and attendee early registration: Friday 7 August 2015
- MVAB Workshop: Thursday PM 10 September 2015

Workshop papers have a minimum of 4 pages and maximum of 6 pages (excluding references). Papers should follow the same formatting style as a BMVC conference paper (http://bmvc2015.swan.ac.uk/?p=2101). Please note that for the workshop, we do not require a one-page abstract.

Papers should be submitted at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mvab2015

Workshop Organisers:
Telmo Amaral, Newcastle University
Stephen Matthews, Newcastle University
Thomas Ploetz, Newcastle University
Stephen McKenna, University of Dundee
Robert Fisher, University of Edinburgh

Contact email address: bmvc.mvab@gmail.com