Guest Editorial: Computer Vision Research at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

This special issue of IJCV presents recent computer vision research at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, an interand multidisciplinary research unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Institute is devoted to basic research in the physical sciences, computation, engineering, biology, behavior, and cognition, and it regroups over 600 researchers from nearly 30 University of Illinois departments as far-ranging as psychology, computer science, and biochemistry. Research at the Beckman Institute focuses on three main themes—namely, Biological Intelligence, Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction, and Molecular and Electronic Nanostructures, and is spread among 15 groups. Our computer vision group is large and diverse, and includes members of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Image Formation and Processing (IFP) groups: Narendra Ahuja, Jean Ponce, and Yoshi Shinagawa are full-time members of the AI group; Tom Huang is a full-time member of the IFP group, and Yi Ma is a part-time member of the AI group as well as a member of the Coordinate Science Laboratory, an other interdisciplinary research center on campus. Ahuja, Huang, Ma, and Shinagawa are also fulltime faculty members in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Jean Ponce is a also full-time faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. Our vision group also collaborates with learning, robotics, speech, and image processing researchers in the AI and IFP groups, as well as human vision researchers in the Human Perception and Performance group of the Institute. The five papers appearing in this issue offer a representative sample of the computer vision research currently taking place in our group, balancing theory and applications, and spanning areas as diverse as motion analysis (Yi Ma), visual tracking (Wu and Huang), image-based modeling and rendering (Habuka and Shinagawa), object recognition (Sethi, Renaudie, Kriegman, and Ponce), and sensor design (Aggarwal and Ahuja). Additional information on the Beckman Institute can be found at http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu. See also http://www-cvr.ai.uiuc.edu and http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu for more information about computer vision research in the AI and IFP groups. Acknowledgments: We wish to thank David Kriegman, now at the University of California at San Diego, for his participation in our research while in the Beckman AI group.