The conference will have theme sessions on the first day

The conference will have theme sessions on the first day (Dec. 13, 2006) by eminent researchers and practitioners. The themes will include Medical Imaging, Animation and Aerial Image Exploitation.

Medical Imaging: This theme session will cover various aspects of Medical Imaging. The speakers of the session are: Prof Baba C Vemuri from University of Florida, Prof Dimitris Metaxas from Rutgers University and Prof Guido Gerig from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Neuro-anatomical structural analysis is essential in a variety of tasks including but not limited to, brain development studies, understanding of neuro-degenerative disorders e.g., schizophrenia, epilepsy, alzheimers etc. MRI provides contrast based delineation of several of the neuro-anatomical structures and in the first talk, automatic methods to achieve this segmentation will be described along with techniques to model these structures and carry out the necessary shape analysis.
- The second talk will focus on a relatively new modality of MR imaging called diffusion weighted MRI. This modality of imaging makes the MR signal sensitive to diffusion of water molecules in the presence of tissue. In the presence of tissue rich in axons, the water molecules exhibit highly anisotropic diffusion and this information can be used to map out the axonal connectivity patterns in, for example, the corpus callosum, the optic chiasm etc. Disruption of these connectivity patterns caused by neuro-degenerative disorders can be observed non-invasively using diffusion MRI. In this second talk, novel automatic tools for analysis of diffusion weighted MRI will be presented along with appropriate visualization techniques.
- Finally, in the third talk, novel methods of 4-dimensional analysis of tagged MR scans of the heart will be presented. Tagged MR imaging is an innovative MR technique that allows one to non-invasively project a grid pattern on the heart and using powerful image analysis techniques, one can recover the cardiac motion, perform stres strain analysis and classification. This talk will focus on various aspects of this analysis including deformable modeling of the heart, motion estimation, stress-strain analysis etc.
Animation: This theme sesssion will include various aspects of human animation. The speakers of the session are: Prof Nadia Magnenat Thalmann from University of Geneva and Prof Daniel Thalmann from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
- Prof. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann would speak on "Problems and solutions in clothing research"
- Prof. Daniel Thalmann will focus on "Issues in Real-time Crowd Simulation".
Digital Image Exploitation for Autonomous Vehicle: Image Exploitation capabilities are required for using high-revisit multi-sensor, multi-resolution imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or other ground or ship based reconnaissance platforms for the purpose of intelligent information gathering. Another related emerging area is the exploitation of these same imagery for autonomous navigation of the imaging platforms themselves. In order to give a boost to these critical research areas within the country, it is planned to organize a one-day workshop on the theme of "Image Exploitation".
The purpose of this Theme Session is to bring together eminent personalities in the field of Image Exploitation from the country and abroad from such diverse backgrounds as Academics, Defense / Space research and private Industries. The day long activities will include invited talks, short presentations from various institutions and a brainstorming session with the objective of matching up research capabilities with user requirements.
The Session will be inaugurated by Shri M Natarajan, Scientific Advisor to Raksha Mantri, invited talks from Prof. Narendra Ahuja, UIUC, USA, Dr. Harpreet Sahani, Director, Vision and Learning Laboratory, Sarnoff Corporation USA, Dr. K L Majumdar, Head Image Processing, SAC Ahmedabad and Shri G. Elangovan, Director ADE .