Motivation

A wide array of problems in Visual Computing can be naturally formulated as optimization tasks. In this context one wants to optimize an objective function that measures how well a set of hidden parameters fits to the observed visual data. The popularity of these approaches stems from the fact that most processes related to Visual Computing are typically characterized by a lack of closed form solutions, and uncertainties (due to noise, imperfect sensors, ambiguities in the visual interpretation etc.). As a result perfect or exact solutions hardly exist, whereas inexact but optimal (in an application-specific sense) solutions and their efficient computation is what one aims at.

Computer vision, computer graphics and medical imaging are three areas of Visual Computing for which the optimization paradigm has gained a significant interest within the last years, largely due to the development of highly efficient and sophisticated optimization techniques, which are capable of handling large scale problems with complex objective functions. In this special issue we are soliciting papers from all the above mentioned fields that present new theoretical contributions as well as interesting applications of optimization methods.

Topics

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Image and video modeling
• Image segmentation
• Motion estimation and tracking
• Texture synthesis
• Image/video completion
• Optical flow
• Discrete or continuous optimization approaches
• Variational methods
• Markov Random Fields (inference, learning and MAP estimation)
• Graph-cuts, linear programming, message-passing methods
• PDEs
• Level set methods
• Comparison of performance
• Computational complexity
• Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques

Submissions

All submissions should be full journal length versions, and will undergo the complete CVIU peer review process. Manuscripts must be submitted through the CVIU online submission system: to ensure proper routing of the submission, the "Article Type" must be selected as "Special Issue: Optimization for Vision, Graphics and Medical Imaging - Theory and Applications". The guest editors may return some submissions without evaluation if they are not aligned with the scope of the issue.

Important Dates

Submission due: April 15, 2010
Results of first round: July, 2010
Revised paper due: September, 2010
Final Decisions: December, 2010
Issue Publication: Spring 2011