Call for Papers

Visual surveillance is a major research area in computer vision. The recent rapid increase in the number of surveillance cameras has led to a strong demand for automatic methods of processing their outputs. The scientific challenge is to devise and implement automatic systems for obtaining detailed information about the activities and behaviours of people and vehicles observed by a single camera or by a network of cameras.  

Visual Surveillance is a key technology in the following areas:

• the fight against terrorism and crime including threat assessment
• public safety, especially in transport networks, town centres and public facilities such as schools, hospitals and sports grounds
• the efficient management of transport networks and public facilities

The growth in the development of the field has not been met with complementary systematic performance evaluation of developed techniques. It is especially difficult to make comparisons between algorithms if they have been tested on different datasets under widely varying conditions. 

A one day workshop is being held in New York in conjunction with CVPR 2006. The workshop continues the theme of the highly successful PETS workshops. This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in performance evaluation of visual tracking and surveillance algorithms. The workshop is also unique in that all participants are evaluating algorithms on the same data-sets. Further to this, the workshop is an opportunity to present and discuss methodologies and criteria for objective evaluation of visual surveillance algorithms.  

For PETS 2006, the theme is multi-sensor event recognition in crowded public areas.

Submissions are solicited which: 

• Contribute to performance evaluation methodologies for tracking and/or surveillance. This can be a general paper outlining, for example, a new methodology for evaluation, or performance evaluation best practice etc. It is not necessary to explictly consider the datasets provided for the workshop, however you are encouraged to use the PETS data-sets available here.
• Describe an approach to event recognition and report results based on the data-sets provided for this workshop. The paper should include evaluation of the results obtained on the data (to be submitted in XML format).

The datasets will be made available to participants of the workshop session. The focus of the data-sets is left-luggage scenarios of increasing complexity, captured using multiple sensors.

Important Dates

14 May 2006 (final extension)

Deadline for electronic paper submission

24 May 2006

Notification of acceptance

31 May 2006

Deadline for camera-ready version

18 June 2006

Date for workshop in New York