First ACM SIGMM international workshop on Video surveillance

Welcome to IWVS-2003, the First ACM International Workshop on Video Surveillance, held in Berkeley, California, U.S.A. on November 7th, 2003, in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Multimedia. IWVS is an international forum for the exchange of research results and practical experience in the field of video surveillance.With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras and the deployment of high-speed, wired/wireless networks, it has become economically and technically feasible to employ multiple cameras for security surveillance. In a surveillance system, video signals are generated by multiple cameras which may or may not include spatially and temporally overlapping coverage. In order to facilitate queries and/or mining by security and law enforcement personnel, these signals must be transmitted, processed, fused, stored, indexed, and then summarized as semantic events. This workshop brings together researchers, developers, and practitioners, from academia and industry, to discuss various issues involved in developing a large-scale video surveillance system: e.g., from low-level feature extraction to high-level object and motion descriptions, from camera control to networks, to storage and indexing, and from theory to practice.The IWVS-2003 technical program features three sessions: object detection tracking, event recognition, and application. The program also features a panel consisting of several outstanding speakers from academia and industry, in a discussion of ethical and technical aspects of video surveillance. For our technical program, we received thirty-six submissions, and the review process was very selective. Each paper was independently reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, and clarity of presentation. Of the thirty-six submissions, we selected twelve papers for oral presentation (an acceptance ratio of 33%). In addition, outstanding papers were forwarded to the editorial board of a special issue of ACM Multimedia Journal for further review and consideration.