1^st International Workshop on Computer vision + ONTology Applied Cross-disciplinary Technologies

September 7^th, 2014 in Zurich, Switzerland, in conjunction with ECCV 2014

Best Paper Award offered by IOS Press

Best Student Paper Award offered by IAOA

Image and video understanding is the process of converting elementary visual entities (pixels, voxels) to symbolic forms of knowledge (textual tags, predicates), by means of various kinds of models (statistical classifiers, neural networks, expert systems, etc.). It represents the highest processing level in a computer vision system, operating usually on top of a basic processing layer, which extracts intermediate image representations (patches, volumes). Due to the unconstrained nature of photographic images and videos, and the lack of fully reliable low-level features, the process of image understanding may be helped grounding it with a prior semantic model describing any domain knowledge, which may operate during both learning and inference. This semantic layer is usually represented by means of an ontology, intended as a set of primitive concepts and relations expressed by axioms providing an interpretation to the vocabulary chosen for the visual description of a domain.

After the early steps in the eighties, the research domain that cross-pollinates computer vision and formal ontology stagnated, limited probably by the lack of available domain ontologies. However, more recently, with the creation of shared resources as ImageNet, TinyImage, Labelme, on the computer vision side, and WordNet on the formal ontology side, the area exploded, leading to an exponential growth in the scientific community.

The aim of CONTACT 2014 is to bring together a wide range of researchers in computer vision and machine learning on one side, and formal ontology on the other, to share innovative ideas and solutions for exploiting the potential synergies emerging from the integration of the two domains, for object and event recognition, scene, image and video understanding, with the long term goals of promoting the development of a proper visual ontology and a better understanding of how such a visual ontology could be used for visual inference.

CONTACT 2014 will be the first of a series of events which will have an interesting yet unique characteristic: in order to gradually connect the communities of computer vision and formal ontologies in a tight relationship, the CONTACT workshop will be hosted iteratively in a major computer vision conference (as ECCV is) and in a major ontology conference (as FOIS - Formal Ontologies for Information Systems): this way, the cross-fertilization will take place by involving the best of the two communities, with alternative emphasis on one facet or the other.

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings will be published post-conference by Springer; in this way, the final camera ready can include comments received during the conference. Pre-papers are papers which should account for the received reviews, that will be loaded on the conference USB stick to allow their dissemination during the ECCV event.

Best Paper Award

A "Best Paper Award" of 500€ granted by IOS press will be conferred to the author(s) of a full paper presented at the workshop, selected by the Organizing Committee based on the best combined marks of paper reviewing, assessed by the Program Committee, and paper presentation quality, assessed by Organizing Committee at the conference venue.

Best Student Paper Award

A "Best Student Paper Award" of 300 euros granted by IAOA will be conferred to a PhD (or Master or Bachelor) student who is among the authors of a full paper presented at the workshop, selected by the Organizing Committee based on the best combined marks of paper reviewing, assessed by the Program Committee, and paper presentation quality, assessed by Organizing Committee at the conference venue. Moreover, free membership to the IAOA will be granted to three PhD students who are among the authors of papers selected following the same criteria.

Special Issue

A special issue of a top-class journal on the topics of the workshop is planned for the next year (2015).

Technical Program

9.00 – 9.05	Opening
09.05 – 10.05	Keynote Talk: Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University, USA
10.05 – 10.30	Uncertainty Modeling Framework for Constraint-based Elementary Scenario Detection in Vision System Crispim-Junior C. and Bremond F.
10.30 – 11.15	Coffee Break
11.15 – 11.40	Mixing Low-Level and Semantic Features for Image Interpretation Donadello I. and Serafini L.
11.40 – 12.05	Events detection using a video-surveillance Ontology and a rule-based approach Kazi Y., Lablack A., Ghomari A. and Bilasco I. M.
12.05 – 12.30	Semantic-Analysis Object Recognition: Automatic Training Set Generation Using Textual Tags Abdulhak S. A., Riviera W, Zeni N., Cristani M., Ferrario R. and Cristani M.
12.30 – 14.00	Lunch Break
14.00 – 15.00	Keynote Talk: What can Ontological Realism and Referent Tracking contribute to computer vision? Werner Ceusters, New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, USA
15.00 – 15.25	Characterizing predicate arity and spatial structure for inductive learning of game rules Dwibedi D. and Mukerjee A.
15.25 – 15.50	SceneNet: A Perceptual Ontology for Scene Understanding Kadar I. and Ben-Shahar O.
15.50 – 16.00	Awards
16.00 – 16.45	Coffee Break
16.45 – 17.10	Multi-entity bayesian networks for knowledge-driven analysis of ICH content Nikolopoulos S., Chantas G., Kompatsiaris I., Grammalidis N., Dimitropoulos K., Kitsikidis A. and Douka S.
17.10 – 17.35	ALC(F): a new description logics for spatial reasoning in images Hudelot C., Atif J. and Bloch I.
17.35 – 18.00	Perceptual Narratives of Space and Motion for Semantic Interpretation of Visual Data Suchan J., Bhatt M. and Santos P. E.
18.00 – 18.15	Closing

1st International Workshop on Computer vision + ONTology Applied Cross-disciplinary Technologies

September 7th, 2014 in Zurich, Switzerland, in conjunction with ECCV 2014