Conference report by Wei Ji, Colour Imaging Institute, University of Derby

The Second European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging and Vision (CGIV2004) was held at the technology centre AGIT in Aachen, Germany, April 5-8, 2004. The conference is on a wide range of topics related to colour and visual information with over 50 oral and 60 poster presentations presented by scientists and engineers from 23 countries. Not only universities, but also industrial research and development groups were invited. This ensures that the academic researches and industrial applications can be easily connected and referable with each other.

The first day of the conference was dedicated to tutorials on 10 topics by a group of famous experts in the area, which covered colour in visual system, colour reproduction, colour management, colour appearance modelling, colour computer vision, image synthesis, multispectral colour imaging, and colour imaging quality.

The technical program started by General Chair Prof. Bernhard Hill on Tuesday, 6th April. There were 2 invited papers from distinguished speakers on digital colour reproduction by John Meyer and colour constancy by David H. Foster followed by oral session on visual and colour science. On the third day, there were two tracks. One track was a special session on multi-spectral colour science and the other track was on industrial and other applications, colour in computer vision and colour in image processing. The last day was the forum for colour in image scanning, display and printing.

The poster sessions were hosted from Tuesday to Thursday, after lunchtime and before the afternoon oral session. This arrangement is particularly useful because it gives plenty of time for informal talks to let people understanding a particular work they are interested in detail and give plenty of interesting suggestions and feedback. In addition to above programs, there was an exhibition of industrial firms presenting newest products related to colour science and applications.

I attended most of the sessions except the multi-spectral session on Wednesday because my talk was allocated in track 2, session 3B "industrial and other application session". My talk was entitled as "A New Method for Assessing Gloss Based on Digital Imaging". The presentation went very well because of the well preparations. I did several rehearsals before the real presentation and the preparation made my first one in such a big international conference a successful one. Some experts show particular interesting on my topic with a lot of useful suggestions, not only during the presentation but also in informal chats after the presentation. Some further works were defined straight away with all those valuable information, such as testing the method in other research centres in France and applying the method to measure other objects, which is difficult to measure by using conventional gloss meters.

As this is the first international conference I attended, it gives me a lot of impression and experience. Famous people you only read their names on the paper or book previously now talk to you directly. A lot of new approaches and new information were presented to open your mind. Different people with different backgrounds show their particular area, the received new information can be 10 times more than a local conference.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, this conference linked academy with industry together tightly. From the industrial exhibition, I noticed that there was a company presenting a multispectral imaging system named ColorAIXperts. My supervisor was interesting in their multispectral approach and I was interesting in their display units. They used a controlled viewing booth called SpAIXview to display real sample and CRT image captured by multispectral scan side by side. With a great controlled environment, observers could perceive very small differences between the original and the reproduction. Some one even could not distinguish them. The displaying unit will be applicable for our future psychophysical works.

As addressed by Mayor of Aachen in Welcome Evening: a group of colour people from all over the world get together in the conference to share the knowledge and technology, afterwards, we will make the world more colourful.

I would like to thank the Royal Photographic Society Imaging Science Group for the award of this year's Research Student Travel Grant which enabled me to travel to Aachen Germany for fantastic CGIV 2004 conference.