Preface

Welcome to the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer Vision! Following a very successful ECCV 2002, the response to our call for papers was almost equally strong – 555 papers were submitted. We accepted 41 papers for oral and 149 papers for poster presentation. Several innovations were introduced into the review process. First, the number of program committee members was increased to reduce their review load. We managed to assign to program committee members no more than 12 papers. Second, we adopted a paper ranking system. Program committee members were asked to rank all the papers assigned to them, even those that were reviewed by additional reviewers. Third, we allowed authors to respond to the reviews consolidated in a discussion involving the area chair and the reviewers. Fourth, the reports, the reviews, and the responses were made available to the authors as well as to the program committee members. Our aim was to provide the authors with maximal feedback and to let the program committee members know how authors reacted to their reviews and how their reviews were or were not reflected in the final decision. Finally, we reduced the length of reviewed papers from 15 to 12 pages. The preparation of ECCV 2004 went smoothly thanks to the efforts of the organizing committee, the area chairs, the program committee, and the reviewers. We are indebted to Anders Heyden, Mads Nielsen, and Henrik J. Nielsen for passing on ECCV traditions and to Dominique Asselineau from ENST/TSI who kindly provided his GestRFIA conference software. We thank Jan-Olof Eklundh and Andrew Zisserman for encouraging us to organize ECCV 2004 in Prague. Andrew Zisserman also contributed many useful ideas concerning the organization of the review process. Olivier Faugeras represented the ECCV Board and helped us with the selection of conference topics. Kyros Kutulakos provided helpful information about the CVPR 2003 organization. David Vernon helped to secure ECVision support. This conference would never have happened without the support of the Centre for Machine Perception of the Czech Technical University in Prague. We would like to thank Radim Šára for his help with the review process and the proceedings organization. We thank Daniel Večerka and Martin Matoušek who made numerous improvements to the conference software. Petr Pohl helped to put the proceedings together. Martina Budošová helped with administrative tasks. Hynek Bakstein, Ondřej Chum, Jana Kostková, Branislav Mičuš́ık, Štěpán Obdržálek, Jan Šochman, and Vı́t Zýka helped with the organization.