CALL FOR PAPERS

              Second International Workshop on
Recognition, Analysis and Tracking of Faces and Gestures 
                  in Real-time Systems
                    (RATFG-RTS 2001)
     http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/aws/ratfg/

In conjunction with ICCV 2001, Vancouver, Canada 13/14th July 2001.

Summary

Many applications such as human-computer interaction, surveillance or
video indexing require the accurate, detection and tracking of faces
and hands, as well as recognition and interpretation of their gestures
and recognition of the faces. Common to all these application fields
is that they have to meet relatively fixed real-time demands. The
workshop is intended to expand the scope of the ICCV conference to
novel approaches in the area of face and hand gesture tracking and
recognition, and the visual monitoring of human activity. The workshop
will stress techniques and systems which tackle problems in
real-time. A major goal of the workshop is to highlight and discuss
the relevance of recent developments to industrial applications. We
therefore encourage the participation of representatives from
industry.

Scope

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Localization and tracking of faces and hands
* Face recognition
* Localization and recognition of facial features and action units. 
  Facial expression detection and interpretation.
* Dynamics and learning for gesture interpretation
* Applications of face and hand gesture recognition
* Applications in the area of teleconferencing and distance learning
* Retrieval of faces in video sequences
* Video compression of facial and body movements, particularly in
  MPEG4 encoders.
* Tracking of people, surveillance and visual interpretation of 
  human movements.

Format

The workshop is expected to follow the successful format of RATFG'99
and will last one-and-a-half days, and consist of sessions of invited
talks and oral paper presentations. In addition we expect to organize
a poster session to allow the presentation of additional papers in a
more informal atmosphere. Demonstrations of research and industrial
systems within the scope of the conference are also encouraged.

Invited speakers

A number of important speakers from the above fields are to be invited to
present papers.

Currently Hans Peter Graf of AT&T Labs Research has agreed to speak.

RATFG-RTS 1999 speakers included

Bill Freeman            MERL, USA;
James Crowley           INRIA, France;
Dimitris Metaxas,       University of Pennsylvania;
Thomas Vetter,          MPI Fuer Biol. Kybernetik, Germany.

Submission procedures

Authors are invited to submit original papers as well as reports of
applications to the workshop chair:

Andrew Senior,
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,
PO Box 708,
Yorktown Heights,
NY 10598, USA.
Email: aws@watson.ibm.com

Electronic submissions, by email, are encouraged, with postscript or
pdf formats preferred. Please supply separately, the following
information:

* Paper title
* Key words
* Name, address, phone and fax number for the contact author.
* Preference for poster or oral presentation.

Papers should be no longer than 8 pages, should include an abstract of
approximately 300 words, and should be in 12 point font with 1.5 line
spacing. Papers must be received no later than 4th February
2001. Papers will be reviewed by members of the program committee.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be published by the IEEE. Electronic submission of
final papers will be necessary.

Important dates

Papers due                              4 February 2001.
Notification of acceptance              22 March 2001.
Camera ready copy due to IEEE CS press  20 April 2001.
Workshop                                13/14 July 2001.

Organizing committee

Andrew Senior.          IBM Research, USA.
Rainer Herpers          Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany.
Markus Michaelis        Plettac Electronics & INRIA Rhone-Alpes.
W. James MacLean        University of Toronto, Canada.

Sponsorship

We are very pleased to receive very generous sponsorship from Plettac
Electronics, and administrative support from IBM Research.

Programme committee

To be confirmed, but including:

Hans Peter Graf  AT&T Labs Research
S. Gang          Queen Mary & Westfield College, London. 
J. Crowley       I.N.P. Grenoble, General Chair FG 2000
D.N. Metaxas     Vision, Analysis and Simulation Technologies Laboratory, 
                 University of Pennsylvania
S. Kollias       National Technical University of Athens
F. Kjeldsen      IBM Research
G. Sommer        University of Kiel.
A. Stoschek      Infineon.

Web page

The workshop web page is at
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/aws/ratfg/ and is being updated
regularly. Please check back here for more information.


Andrew Senior aws@watson.ibm.com