Conference report: Bhaskar Choubey, Department of Engineering Sciences, University of Oxford, UK
The 30th edition of the International Congress of Imaging Science was held in Rochester, New York, USA from 7th to 13th of May 2006. And what a venue to have an imaging congress! For few cities can rival Rochester, when it comes to imaging history. This was the place where George Eastman started the Kodak company and revolutionized photography for ever. The city also gave birth to the world's largest document management company Xerox, and Xerox still has its largest base here. To add to imaging prowess of Rochester, Bausch and Lamb, the medical optics company is also based here. Little wonder then, ICIS, this year had an extra zeal attached to it. ICIS (started as International Congress of Photographic Science, in 1889) is held every 3-4 years and brings together scientists and technologists from a wide spectrum of fields associated with imaging, and this year was no different.
The congress started with a plenary session of four talks. These talks on consumer photography, medical imaging, ubiquitous imaging and imaging in Hollywood, gave a broad overview of the major applications as well as major obstacles in the current trends in imaging. Glenn Kennel's talk on why it took so long to digitize Hollywood was an attractive introduction to the field, generally neglected by mainstream scientists. Four parallel technical sessions were held as part of the congress. The first of digital and analogue capture was of particular interest to me. It was further subdivided in sessions on optics and digital processing, Imagers, Systems &medical image capture. My paper on dark current reduction techniques for wide dynamic range sensors, formed part of the imagers session. The same session saw some important works on organic detectors, wide dynamic range displays and and multi-layered sensors.
The second track of the congress was on hard-copy and photographic printing, with sessions on electrophotography, photothermography, silver halides and Image permanence & digital media. The third track was on imaging sciences, with session on colour science, perception and quality; image enhancement, display and rendering; information extraction and exploitation algorithms and measuring & modelling and specifying display image quality. The last session on display image quality was shared with the fourth track, which was on displays technologies. Other sessions in the fourth track were on basic technologies, e-paper and flexible display & 3-D display.
In the afternoon of 10th of May, there was a tour of the imaging research facilities in the Rochester Institute of Technology. There was also a panel discussion on future of imaging. The panelists looked at various aspects including consumer, hardware as well as software. This was followed by yet another plenary talk on imaging in space exploration systems. The day ended with the celebrations of 20 years of RIT's imaging science lab and presentation by RIT students. 11th of May was devoted to sessions on frontiers in imaging and an interactive paper session. The speakers of the frontiers in imaging session touched various issues like watermarking, sematic scene content understanding, computer vision, medical imaging, retinal imaging, colour imaging, image analysis, nanolithography, wireless remote imaging and wave imaging. The interactive paper session had papers from all four tracks of the main technical sessions. I presented a poster on fixed pattern noise in wide dynamic range imagers in this session.
On 9th of May, we also had the congress reception in the George Eastman house, the abode of George Eastman, which has now been converted into an international museum of photography. This was a very special part of the congress, as we came face to face with the flow of imaging in the last century. With every major camera model on display, supported by a large collection of internationally acclaimed photographs, the congress could not have a better reception. The last day of the congress, May 12th, was dedicated to social activities. We had a trip to world famous Niagara Falls, where in most of us, wondered if we could make better imaging devices to capture this natural beauty in a better fashion. The annual lilac festival of Rochester also started on the last day of the congress and gave me extra opportunity to know about Rochester area. I would like to record my thanks to the Imaging Science group of the Royal photographic society, for their award which enabled me to attend this congress.