Computer Vision Bibliography

One major area of pattern recognition has been the analysis of checks. The initial coding was for bank information, but now pattern recognition has migrated to ATMs. Deposit a stack of checks and the ATM tries to read the amount and generate your deposit slip. This works for checks that have normal printed amounts, but has consistently failed for check with the fancy encoding of the amount (for these the user types the correct amount given an image of the check). Even better you can deposit a stack of random bills, but the machines still only issue $20 bills (I know there are other combinations, such as only $100, or a $20 and a $5, but few options of arbitrary amounts for US banks since the money is all the same size).

The IEEE updated its web site for conferences and journals (ieeexplore.ieee.org). While many of the changes are minor there are two major changes that affect my links to journals, conferences, and papers. First they changed some keyword references — they didn’t change them much, but in a case-sensitive environment little changes matter. Second the summary listings have more access to the abstracts (which can be good), but fewer items per page (which makes it more readable, but harder to page through a conference). Of course, they designer of the new site will point out a lot of other changes which do not really matter to many users. Most things should work now, but it is not practical  to test every ieeexplore reference.

ICIP 2009 papers have been added. The IEEE listing for ICCV is not yet available so those papers, and the associated workshops are not available.

The update this week includes the usual monthly update for the major journals along with another round of Patents. Patents are not completely covered because of the nature of the basic indexing — there is no clean way to track only relevant patents.

But for something really different try Bees learn human faces.

The IEEE Computer Society flagship magazine — Computer has a special issue on Biometrics for February 2010. This issue is not yet indexed on the bibliography, but will be in a few weeks when the links are available from the IEEE.

The first Bibliography update of the new year is the usual collection of journals. Nothing really special. The total entries now exceed 106,000 and we are approaching 16 total years of internet service.

The New York Times has a travel article on visiting the Grand Canyon in the winter.  The writer hiked to the bottom (staying at Phantom Ranch) on fairly short notice (not something to always count on, though with cancellations someone probably gets in on the same day on most days). Anyone who has been down the South Kaibab trail remembers the view in the picture used in the article.

Last week for most of one afternoon I lost access to my web hosting service. I could still read email and could connect via FTP, but the site responded slowly and FTP transfers would fail. The problems seemed to be specific to the provider (other sites behaved correctly, other sites in the same city as the provider worked).  This was not caused by a failure of the service, indeed most users did not notice any problems. The general cause was a failure in one of the routers between my local DSL provider and the hosting service across the country. Which router was involved and the nature of its failure was not clear. The implication for total dependence on remote network computing (cloud or otherwise) is that you are depending on many separate parts, not just one integrated system. And any one of these parts can cause you problems. It also showed to importance of having both phone and internet customer service — I did talk to a person (with no waiting!) who, while puzzled about why he saw no issue, did research the problem.

The PBS documentary on the National Parks covered the history and development of the parks with some emphasis on the inherent conflict between the goal of access for today and preservation for tomorrow.

The most recent update includes a number of recent conferences (September is the busy month for many conferences) from Springer, and the usual list of journals.

On the conference side, the Call for Papers for CVPR 2010 has been released.