25 Other Computer Vision Resources

This page contains a pointers to a number of listings for general Computer Vision Resources.

25.1 Scientific Papers on Computer Vision

The Computer Vision Bibliography provides access to annotated information on over 90,000 scientific papers in the field of computer vision, image processing, character recognition and other related topics. This listing is more than just a list of papers, it has cross references to similar papers and is arranged by (possibly arbitrary) topic. The top level bibliography page has links to browse papers by author (including author arranged by year to reduce your effort in creating annual reports), conference or journal reference, keywords, and a KWIC index (Key Word In Context). I have added the historical Rosenfeld Bibliography data but it is incomplete (i.e. it ends in 1998) and is the result of an automatic translation so there are errors.

25.2 Research Groups in Computer Vision

There are many groups engaged in research in this field. These groups generally are either in some university or are a part of a larger company, with a few small computer vision companies. University groups tend to promote information (in years past some said "Paper is our most important product," but today you should replace paper with information) and provide links to individuals, research projects, and online versions of papers. It is often best to look on the research group or author's individual web site for publicly accessible online versions of technical papers. Companies tend to downplay who is there and give general information about the research and more details on products, and usually do not have technical papers (though this is not universally true). Many companies are listed primarily as vendors of related products rather than research groups even though many of these companies have groups that are primarily involved with research.

Complete Listing of Research Groups
Listing of researchers within Research Groups
Research Groups in the US lists research groups in the US.
Research Groups in the Americas lists research groups in the Americas other than the US. Primarily Canada, but includes Mexico, South and Central America, and the Caribbean region.
Research Groups in Europe lists research groups in Europe.
Research Groups in Asia, Australia, Oceania lists the rest of the world.

25.3 Vendors, Code and Datasets for Related to Computer Vision

Vendors want to sell a result rather than enable you to develop a new method. For some tasks, code may be available so that you can skip the vendor and do it yourself. But for most really interesting tasks, neither a vendor or code exists to solve your problem -- that is the point of research and development.

25.3.1 Vendors of Related Products

For some products I have a list of vendors, which sometimes overlap the research groups list and sometimes not. These companies supply the results of research, not necessarily the equipment you need to perform research (i.e. I do not provide an extensive list for cameras and computers). Vendors are listed throughout the bibliography, usually in the appropriate section for the product, but an extracted list, ordered by product, is available at the Vision Bib Vendor Listing.

25.3.2 Code for Computer Vision Algorithms

The standard location for basic code for computer vision algorithms is the OpenCV Library from Intel. Many research groups build on top of this OpenCV code base. The avaliability of code for specific techniques or applications is harder to predict, but some implementations are made available by the authors. Try the listing extracted from the Vision Bibliography in the Vision Bib Code Reference Listing. You may want a computer vision system by name (e.g. Acronym), for this you can look under the Vision Bib Computer Vision Systems Listing. A number of lists of code for sub-areas (e.g. OCR) have been created by researchers in the past, but often these are no longer maintained. These lists are linked in the above listing.

25.3.3 Databases or Datasets for Applications

Test data is available in bits and pieces and in several larger repositories, A number of references are given in the Vision Bib Dataset Listing. Generally, to avoid confusion, in this bibliography database is used for database systems or research and would apply to image database query techniques rather than a database containing images for use for specific applications. To reduce confusion I have chosen to use dataset for such collections of images.

25.3.4 Patents

For any area in computer vision and image processing, there are patents that cover a number of large and small developments. Many have related papers, others do not. An initial list, by titles, of US Patents related to Computer Vision is available. A second listing, by US Patent number, can be found under the Patents by Number listing. These should only be considered a starting point in any patent search. Start with something that looks promising and look in the various listings each of which has different options to search the referenced patents, the later patents that reference this one, by topic, by name, etc. There are at least, 5 sources for patent information, presented in different ways, all with full text and images. For example for a single patent you can look at:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Number search (and give, e.g. 4650333 -- a number chosen randomly from the list of patents.)
4,650,333 from Google Patents
4,650,333 from Free Patents Online
4,650,333 from Delphion
4,650,333 from Patent Storm

Each of these has various search options, links to referenced and referencing patents, etc. Most of the patents listed in this bibliography have a link to one of these general listings. Note also that (as of June 18, 2007) the Patent office has created a peer review process for software patents. Peer Review Patents Information. This is intended to expand the pool of people who actually look at a submission and comment on how original it really is.

25.3.5 Survey Articles

Surveys of particular topics are scattered throughout the Bibliography in the appropriate sections. Many of the basic topics have a subsection devoted to general or survey articles so a good starting point for surveys is the contents page for the appropriate major topic. Also you can look through the Vision Bib Survery Listing.The CV-Online Compendium of Computer Vision has general overviews on many topics. Some of these are included in the Survey listing.

25.4 The Complete Conference Listing for Computer Vision and Image Analysis

The Conference Listing is an important resource for finding current research presentations. This site lists conferences, workshops, and special journal issues with information on both future meetings (call for papers, deadlines, location, programs, web site, etc.) and past meetings in the Archives pages. Recently held meetings may have pointers to the bibliography listing of the conference papers.

To see the global (or regional) distribution of many of the major conferences using Google Earth look at the conference locations KMZ file.

25.5 Other Useful Sites

25.5.1 CV-Online Compendium of Computer Vision

The best source for basic descriptions of topics or algorithms and the closest to an online book on Computer Vision is CV-Online: The Evolving, Distributed, Non-Proprietary, On-Line Compendium of Computer Vision. You should use this as an introductory resource for most Computer Vision topics.

25.5.2 Vision List -- News group

The Vision List resource has evolved from an old mailing list format, with archives back to 1988. It usually has announcements of various kinds, especially jobs, but often conferences, code, books, questions, etc., are posted. A new issue appears about once a month.

25.5.3 Professional Societies

The major professional organization is the PAMI Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society. The IEEE-CS sponsors conferences and workshops (through the PAMI-TC) and publishes the Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

The international umbrella organization is the IAPR, which is an association of associations (national societies are members, not individuals). Many countries have their own association that primarily runs the national meeting. The Vision Bib Professional Society Listing (a recently corrected link) shows some of the more active such associations. There are also conference specific organizations that exist only to schedule and manage a specific conference through the years. Many of these meetings and those of the national and international organizations are given in the Computer Vision Conference Listing.

Additionally there are a number of organizations (both national and international) in related fields such as optics, artificial intelligence, signal and image processing, remote sensing, photogrammetry, medical imaging, etc. that are relevant for some aspects of computer vision research.

25.5.4 Other Compiled Lists of Research, Sources, etc.

There are topic specific compilations of varying quality found under the survey heading (see the pointer given above). The CMU based Computer Vision pages, which have links from a lot of places, have not been maintained for a number of years, so everything there is best considered history. Therefore, I do not include a link to them here.

Last update:Jul 17, 2008 at 10:02:43

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