It is our great honor and pleasure to welcome you to the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2006) in Toronto, Canada. This year, the technical program has built on a great ICME tradition as the world's premier technical conference in the field of multimedia and has achieved record setting performance in paper submission, acceptance rate, and accepted papers.
We are pleased to report that we have received record number of submissions with 1022 papers from xx different countries. This record number of submissions shows that ICME has already become the conference of choice for all fields of multimedia. With such a significant increase in paper submissions, we have to recruit over 300 experts to form the technical program committee (TPC) to ensure that all papers are reviewed by at least three members of the TPC. The members of the TPC listed in the following pages include experts from all four sponsoring society: Circuits and Systems, Communications, Computer, and Signal Processing. These experts generously volunteered their time and effort to ensure the excellence of the technical program and to handle the significant increase of paper submissions. On behalf of the ICME 2006 Organizing Committee, we would like to thank all TPC members for their dedication and timely review of the record number of submissions.
Based on the reviews provided by the Technical Program Committee, the Technical Program Chairs selected 552 papers that were organized into 51 oral sessions, 30 poster sessions, and 10 special sessions. The accepted papers include special session papers that have much higher acceptance rate. Even though the number of the accepted papers sets a record, the acceptance rate from general submission stands at record low of 51%. Therefore, this year’s ICME has been the most selective ICME of all. Among the almost 49% rejected papers from general submissions, many valuable technical works had to be declined due to time and space constraints. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we express our regret to those authors whose submissions could not be accommodated at ICME 2006. We extend warm welcome to these authors to join us at ICME 2006 to exchange with your colleagues at the conference. Overall, the process resulted in an excellent technical program covering a wide range of topics, including several emerging fields in multimedia.
The highlights of this year’s ICME are the keynotes speeches given by four world renowned experts in multimedia. On Monday July 10, we will have Prof. K. J. Ray Liu from the University of Maryland delivering a keynote speech on “Multimedia Forensics: Where Sherlock Holmes Meets Hollywood” in the morning, and Prof. Tas Venetsanopoulos from the University of Toronto delivering a keynote speech on “Multimedia Signal Processing and Content-Based Image Retrieval (a Survey)” in the afternoon. On Tuesday July 11, we will have Prof. Sun-Yuan Kung from Princeton University delivering a keynote speech on “Machine Learning for Multi-Modality Genomic Data Mining” and on Wednesday July 12, we will have Prof. Thomas Huang from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign delivering a keynote speech on “Ten Challenge Problems in Content-based Image and Video Retrieval.” We encourage every participant of ICME 2006 to attend all four outstanding keynote speeches.
The technical activity of ICME 2006 will officially start on Sunday, July 9, with seven tutorials organized by the Tutorials Co-Chairs, Liang-Gee Chen and Anthony Vetro. Attendees can get overviews of the state of the art in several key areas of multimedia:
Ten special sessions have been organized by the Special Sessions Chairs, Jiebo Luo and Andre Zaccarin. Special sessions were selected based on the quality of the proposals, timeliness of the subject and qualification of the authors. The special sessions are:
We have worked very hard to organize the sessions coherently in order to minimize the potential overlap. We are confident that the attendees will find a great deal of interesting and stimulating material in the technical program to keep them challenged and engaged over the three days of the technical program and beyond. Undoubtedly, organizing a conference with record setting submission as ICME 2006 is a challenging and demanding task. We will not be able to successfully accomplish such task without numerous volunteers’ help. We wish to thank the members of the Organizing Committee for the tremendous amount of time and effort spent into this process, making joint decisions and monitoring the process along the way. In particular, we would like to express our deep appreciation to the TPC Vice Co-Chairs, Mike Christel of Carnegie Mellon University, Jean-Luc Dugelay of Eurecom, France, Panos Nasiopoulos of University of British Columbia, and En-hui Yang of University of Waterloo, for helping us in the entire process of review, acceptance decision, and session organization. We are also greatly in debt to all the Track Chairs for their dedicated work in the tremendous review process. It is these Track Chairs who actually recruited outstanding team of expert reviewers to carry out the challenging tasks of reviewing record number of papers for ICME 2006. Their contributions to ICME 2006 are indeed invaluable.
We would like to thank Microsoft Research for sponsoring the ICME Best Paper Award and IBM for sponsoring the ICME Best Student Paper Award. Their generous support in sponsoring these awards will inspire more innovations in the field of multimedia and will encourage more students to join this young and vibrant multimedia community to pursue their professional career.
We wish to acknowledge the able and tireless contribution of Lance Cotton and his team at Conference Management Services, Inc for managing the online review process, assembling the technical program, and accommodating the selection process for the Best Paper Award and the Best Student Paper Award.
Finally, our appreciation goes to the thousands of multimedia researchers worldwide who have contributed their excellent work to the outstanding technical program of ICME 2006. We hope that you will enjoy the conference and find the technical program exciting. We also hope that you will find some time to attend the social program of ICME 2006 and to visit the great city of Toronto.
Chang Wen Chen and Kostas N. Plataniotis
ICME 2006 Technical Program Co-Chairs