Preface

The International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications was started by Prof. Kunii and his colleagues in 1997, as a biannual event taking place in Japan. Thanks to the fast growing of the community interested in the conference, the event is now run annually and alternating between Asia, Europe and America. SMI conferences address all aspects of shape modeling, from the acquisition and processing to the retrieval and understanding, and provide a unique forum for discussing computational techniques for shape modeling and processing with a community of experts across a wide range of areas in academia and industry. The IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications 2008 (Shape Modeling International 2008 or SMI’08) was organized by Prof. Hong Qin at the Stony Brook University (Stony Brook, New York, USA) on June 4–6, 2008. In response to the call for papers, 52 papers were submitted. After a thorough review process, 24 full papers were selected. In addition, 10 short papers have been care-