This is Marina, PhD student (D3) at IMD Lab.

After spending almost one week in Atlanta (Georgia, USA) for the ISMAR conference, I and Prof. Kato came back to Japan straight to Tsukuba to participate in the ICPR2012 conference.

The ICPR2012 was the twenty-first conference of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) held during November 11th-15th, 2012 at the Tsukuba International Congress Center, Tsukuba, Japan.

It was my first time participating in this conference and I got quite impressed by the amount of papers and participants in this conference. Just to have an idea, there were more than 1,000 participants registered in the advance registration. There were so many people during the opening ceremony that they also used the second floor of the main hall where the ceremony were being held. And the hall itself was already so huge!

The main hall before it got crowded.

Opening ceremony

The conference was divided in five main tracks: Computer and Robot Vision; Virtual Reality and Medical Applications; Pattern Recognition and Applications; Signal, Speech and Video Processing; and Document Analysis. Just to give an idea of the number of papers and posters being presented at this conference, every day there were five parallel sessions plus the poster presentation happening. Also, before the first session in the morning and in the afternoon, 2 poster shotguns were also being held in parallel, with approximately 45 posters in each shotgun session, which is almost 180 posters being presented every day!

In this conference, I found some poster presentations from Brazilian universities 🙂 (around 4). I also met at this conference a former Assist. Professor of IMD Lab, Amano-sensei, who was presenting a poster in this conference:

Amano-sensei presenting his poster.

There were so many awards at this conference, that I cannot really remember all of them. Maybe this information will be available later in the conference’s official homepage.

My presentation was on the 14th, during the Mixed Reality and Human Computer Interaction. The title of our paper was “Robust model-based tracking considering changes in the measurable DoF of the target object“. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of my presentation. 🙁

Overall, I think it was a good experience to participate in this conference, though the contents of some presentations were a bit hard for me to understand. I specially enjoyed the plenary talks given on the first day and the invited talks given every day before some of the papers’ sessions.

It is the premier international conference on research into the science, technology, applications and uses of Mixed and Augmented Reality.

Date: November 5-8th 2012
Place： the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, at Georgia Tech’s Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Goargia, USA
Participants: 350
Oral presentations: 28
Poster presentations: 35

Hello, this is Yuichiro Fujimoto, PhD student (D1).
ISMAR2012… this day finally came.

As mentioned above, ISMAR can be regarded as one of the top conferences in the field of AR/MR．

Since my paper was accepted as a poster presentation miraculously,
I, Marina-san (D3) and Prof. Kato participated in ISMAR2012 in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. from Nov 5-8th.
Please allow me praise the conference since I was yearning for participating in it.

Participants can eat fruits, breads, snacks and so on and drink soft drink as much as they wanted!
Great! ISMAR！

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Paper session (Illumination)

The following is the paper of which I had a high expectation before the conference.

Real-Time Surface Light-field Capture for Augmentation of Planar Specular Surfaces
Jan Jachnik, Richard A. Newcombe, Andrew J. Davison.

After reconstructing target objects using PTAM，this system captures light-field of its surface to simulate specularities in real-time．

I found this system works well and robust when I saw its demonstration.

To date, the sytem can use only planer surfaces. However, the author mentioned that
he has been trying to make it applicable to non-planer surfaces.
I would like to use its source code…

All of the presentations in this session were very interesting to me. I recommend you to check these proceedings.

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Paper session (Interaction)
Needless to say, If a quality of a paper is high, a quality of its presentation is also high．
I could know more about the criteria that papers on AR interaction were acceptable as ISMAR papers.
I strongly recommend you to check these proceedings if you are going to do researches on AR user studies.

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Poster presentation

A little bit about my poster presentation.
A point on which I placed a high value when I made my poster for the conference was that the clarity of the poster structure.
Poster on the left is my poster (hidden behind me…)．
It might look that it was made in only 30 minutes. But I did my best to make it simple and clear.

However, there were so many posters which were made considering various policies.
I found that clarity and simpleness is not the unique important point to take into account. I will make use of this experience for my next poster presentation.
Same as me, there were some participants who focused on the relationship between features of AR and user’s memorization,
but I felt frustrated with my English skill, which did not allow me to discuss these topics with them freely.

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Each award

Best paper is…

Live Tracking and Mapping from both General and Rotation-Only Camera Motion
STEFFEN GAUGLITZ, CHRIS SWEENEY, JONATHAN VENTURA, MATTHEW TURK, TOBIAS HOLLERER.

As you can see in the title, this is about real-time tracking and mapping.
This system uses both a panorama mapping and tracking system and a keyframe-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system
in accordance with camera motions to support any type of camera motion in 3D environment.
In addition, another contribution is that when tracking become failure, system continue to collect and map data to merge them later.

Prof. Kato won the great prize!

10 YEAR LASTING IMPACT AWARD

Marker Tracking and HMD Calibration for a Video-based Augmented Reality Conferencing System
International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR) ’99
HIROKAZU KATO
MARK BILLINGHURST

AWARDED FOR THE SIGNIFICANT ACADEMIC AND COMMERCIAL IMPACT
OF THE ARTOOLKIT. AS THE MOST WIDELY CITED ARTOOLKIT PAPER,
THE RESEARCH PRESENTED IN THIS PAPER BROUGHT AR WITHIN THE
REACH OF COUNTLESS INDIVIDUALS AND HELPED MAKE THE FIELD
WHAT IT IS TODAY.

Congratulation! Prof. Kato!!

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American food

Amazingly, this tomato is not a mini sized tomato.

We had a very nice lunch at a BBQ restaurant, called Daddy D’z.
Kato-sensei, thank you very much for your treat to us.

too big…

Unfortunately, I gradually got accustomed to such size …

I gained 2.5 kilos…

On the last day, I went to the Coca-Cola museum.
Needless to say, it is for my research.

Excellent specular objects

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I thought this participation a excellent opportunity for getting latest knowledge about AR/MR.
Thank you all for your support throughout paper submission, preparing slide and so on.

ISMAR2013 will be held in Adelaide (Australia) and paper submission deadlines are April.
I will try my best with my research even if it costs me my life to participate in it…