IAPR Technical Committee on DISCRETE GEOMETRY (TC18)

Report on DGCI'2003 in Napoli - TC18 main conference

The 11th International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery Conference (DGCI 2003) was held in Napoli, November 19-21, 2003. The two previous editions of this series of conferences, started in 1991, held in Uppsala-Sweden for DGCI December 2000 and in Bordeaux-France for DGCI April 2002. DGCI is now the main conference of TC18-IAPR (TC18 opened in November 2002 on discrete geometry: http://www.tc18.org/).

For this edition in Napoli, Gabriella Sanniti di Baja was the general chair, seconded for the program chair by Stina Svensson and Ingela Nyström and for the local committee by Salvatore Piandedosi, Silvia Rossi and Luca Serino. The organising institutions were the "Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici" (which provided wonderful conference rooms), and the "Institute of Cybernetics E. Caianiello" (for facilities and secretariat work). The conference has been sponsored by IAPR. The three days of the conference were rich of scientific talks and exchanges and also full of nice social events.

Among 68 submitted papers, 23 have been selected for oral presentations and 26 for poster sessions. The conference brought together 76 participants, coming from 16 countries. As usual at DGCI conferences, there was a low cost registration for students. Our colleague Alberto Del Lungo (Dipartimento di Matematica, Siena, Italy) who died suddenly in June 2003, was missing us.

The talk and poster sessions covered some fascinating topics such as discrete geometry, discrete topology, discrete models and transforms, discrete surfaces and volumes, morphology and tomography and various applications to image analysis, image synthesis and visualisation. The three invited speakers showed some important views on their researches related to the field of discrete imagery and then they stimulated new ideas: Prof. Isabelle Bloch, ENST, Paris, France, gave a talk devoted to "Fuzzy spatial relationships from mathematical morphology for model-based pattern recognition and spatial reasoning"; Prof. Longin Jan Latecki, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, gave a precise and efficient process to work on "Shape similarity and visual part"; the last invited talk by Prof. Ralph Kopperman, the City College of New York, New York, USA, about "Topological Digital Topology" was a great event for our community.

All the participants to the conference were happy to discuss about their researches on discrete geometry and many new ideas appears? that we will follow at the next DGCI. Several wonderful social events helped in these discussions. The welcome cocktail and the (Italian) pizza party were already perfect. The gala dinner was delightful and we understood what an Italian dinner means: eight or even nine dishes, each of them better than the others! Everybody enjoys visiting Napoli at free time or looking at the Vesuvio towards "Golfo di Napoli". The organisation was very convenient as the conference took place in the city and the weather was very pleasant. As you have understood, this DGCI'2003 was a success and a great event.

Proceedings of the conference are published by Springer in "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" #2886. Two special issues will come out soon: one in "Image and Vision Computing Journal" and the other in "Discrete Applied Mathematics Journal". The next DGCI Conference will held in Poitiers, France, on April 13-15 2005, organised by SIC laboratory with Prof. Eric Andrès at General Chair. Note that two other events will be close in location and date: ? April 11-13 2005, Poitiers, 5rd IAPR -TC-15 Workshop on Graph-Based Representations in Pattern Recognition; ? April 18-20 2005, Paris, International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology See http://www.tc18.org/ or http://www.sic.sp2mi.univ-poitiers.fr/dgci/ for more details about the conference and moreover about the TC18-IAPR on Discrete Geometry (do not forget to register!).

Prof. Annick Montanvert LIS Laboratory - Grenoble