Welcome from the General Co-Chairs

Traditionally the APRS has organised a technical meeting every year since its inception in 1990 - a major 3-day refereed conference (DICTA) in odd numbered years and a workshop in even numbered years. Unfortunately we weren't able to organise a workshop in 2004 despite attempts to get a meeting going in other cities, so we decided to organise a workshop in Brisbane in early 2005.  This left us with a problem since we had already agreed to run DICTA in Brisbane in 2005 and didn't want to run consecutive events in the same city. To solve this dilemma, we have now moved DICTA to Cairns to give APRS members a chance to see that beautiful city as well.

After DICTA2002, a membership poll was conducted to determine whether members wanted the workshops to meet the same reviewing standards as DICTA, so that papers would receive full academic credit. This motion was overwhelmingly supported, so WDIC2005 is also being run as an internationally peer reviewed conference with electronic submission, reviewing and publication.

The theme for the keynote address and the oral sessions is “Pattern Recognition and Imaging for Medical Applications.” To give an opportunity for all members of the pattern recognition community to participate, papers that are of general interest to the Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision Community appear in the poster sessions.

We received a large number of submissions despite the late advertising and registrations are also strong. As per APRS tradition, registrants at WDIC2005 are given one-year membership of the APRS which includes notices via the mailing list and discounts on APRS and IAPR technical events. I am looking forward to an exciting technical program and to meeting you all at the workshop.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Anthony Maeder  and the e-Health Research Centre for their excellent support in organising this event. Furthermore, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Technical Committee for their very speedy responses to our reviewing requests.

We do hope you enjoy WDIC2005!

Brian Lovell
General Co-Chair of WDIC2005
President of the Australian Pattern Recognition Society
Director Engineering Programs, School of ITEE, UQ


ICPR2004, Cambridge

 

Welcome to WDIC2005, which continues a tradition in place since 1990 of APRS specialist Workshops running in the years between the bi-annual DICTA conferences.  The last such Workshop was WDIC 2003, also held in Brisbane, and it seemed to APRS committee that with the strong support that event received, a follow-up event was warranted.  We were pleased to receive about 40 submissions for WDIC2005, of which 34 were accepted following a rigorous reviewing process.  The timing of WDIC 2005 has been moved to early in the year to avoid the "vacation effect" of December/January, which it was felt might lead to reduced attendance for such a small scale event.  We have retained a single day format as we have found that this helped to contain costs for the event, and was preferred by local delegates who make up the bulk of our registrations.

This year's workshop has the theme of Pattern Recognition and Imaging for Medical Applications, an area which is of growing interest nationally in Australia as improvements in the safety, quality and efficiency of healthcare become prominent issues.  The range of topics varies from new image processing techniques for the extraction of image information, to algorithmic methods allowing use of images from multiple modalities for clinical purposes. 

In line with the Workshop theme, our invited Keynote Speaker Dr Sebastien Ourselin from CSIRO ICT Centre BioMedia Lab, is an accomplished research leader in this field who will share with us his experiences of international research engagement and provide details of the diverse range of projects being undertaken by his research team based in Sydney. APRS will continue to profile medical Imaging and Pattern Recognition over the coming years, in anticipation of the major international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) which will be held in Brisbane in October 2007.

 

We are grateful to CSIRO for supporting WDIC 2005 through the e-Health Research Centre unit within its ICT Centre.  We also acknowledge with gratitude the significant in-kind contributions from The University of Queensland, Griffith University, and Queensland University of Technology, through provision of resources and time.  As always, APRS is committed to supporting events of a collaborative nature and organisation of this workshop has been accomplished with the willing involvement of parties from all the above institutions.

Please enjoy the workshop, and use the occasion to broaden or strengthen your contacts with others in the APRS community.

Anthony Maeder
General Co-Chair of WDIC2005
APRS Committee Member
Research Director, e-Health Research Centre