================================
    Announcement and Call for Papers
 
 IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision
 July 8th (pre ICCV 2001) --- Vancouver, Canada
 
 As recognized by the Gestalt school, the importance of perceptual
 organization (PO) in human vision cannot be overestimated; it imparts
 both efficiency and robustness to the visual process. Since early
 demonstrations in the 1980s underscored its usefulness in object
 recognition, the computer vision community has seen various applications
 of PO in artificial vision systems such as in stereo matching, model
 indexing, contour completion, figure-ground segmentation, change
 detection, and more.  Indeed, it can be argued that a reasonable
 computational model of perception can be built around the notion of
 repeated detection and classification of organized structure. 
 
 Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the application of
 perceptual organization to computer vision tasks. In this workshop we
 intend to bring together researchers focusing on different aspects of
 perceptual organization, share ideas, debate the role(s) of perceptual
 organization in artificial vision systems and outline future research
 directions. 
 
 The workshop will consist of high quality technical papers describing
 new or ongoing work in perceptual organization, as well as a few
 invited talks from other, related, disciplines (one of them given by
 Prof. Adelson from MIT). We intend to provide enough time for
 discussion during the sessions as well as a special open discussion by
 the end of the workshop.
 
 Work in all areas related to perceptual organization is welcome.  This
 includes, but is not limited to work in the domains of: modeling human
 performance on psychophysical stimuli; segmentation or grouping in
 single natural images; segmentation of medical or other non-visual
 imagery; and segmentation in video of independently moving objects.
 Relevant techniques include, but are not limited to, graph-based
 algorithms including spectral methods; search algorithms; techniques
 from learning including E-M, belief propagation, and Markov Chain Monte
 Carlo methods; and level set methods. 
 
 The abstracts of the accepted papers will be disseminated among the
 participants as an informal proceedings. All authors are invited to
 submit their papers to a special issue of IEEE PAMI dedicated to POCV. A
 separate call for papers for this special issue will be published soon.
 The deadline is expected to be around December 2001. 
 
 PAPER SUBMISSION: Since we will not produce a published proceedings,
 we do not preclude submissions describing work that will appear in
 other forums.  However, please mention in your cover letter if this
 work has already been accepted to another workshop or conference. Four
 copies of an extended abstract (up to 4 pages, double-space, 12 pt, 1
 inch margins) should be received no later than March 30, 2001 by
    Michael Lindenbaum, Computer Science Dept., Technion, Haifa 32000, 
    Israel  ( mailto:mic@cs.technion.ac.il  Phone: 972-4-8294331)
 
 The program committee:  
 David Jacobs. Michael Lindenbaum (joint chairs) 
 Arnon Amir, Kim Boyer, Pietro Perona, 
 Ruth Rosenholtz, Sudeep Sarkar, Arnold Smeulders, 
 Yair Weiss, Lance Williams, Steven Zucker. 
 
 For updates and more information please refer to meeting page  
 http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~mic/POCV2001/pocv2001.html
 or send mail to either mailto:dwj@research.nj.nec.com or to
 mailto:mic@cs.technion.ac.il .