BMVA 2013 Summer School Review

So after a much needed weekend of recuperation from the BMVA 2013 Summer School held at
The University of Manchester it's time to get back to work, but before I do here's a (very) quick summary/review of the summer school.

Me: Back row, second from right.
Image taken from the facebook group.

What is it?

It is a Summer School aimed at PhD students in their 1st year of study in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. It was attended by 40+ students, mostly from across the UK and some from further afield. The week was crammed with lectures and a couple of lab sessions. Schedule follows...

Day 1: 

13:30 - Image Formation
15:30 - Poster Session - Amazingly, I won the best poster prize! I received an Amazon voucher and a Computer Vision book (Computer and Machine Vision: Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities by E. R. Davies - Link or on Kindle)
Poster at the bottom...

Day 2:

09:00 - Biological Vision
11:00 - Low Level Vision
13:30 - Presentation from +Tomos Williams at Image Metrics - Very impressive results (Video)
15:30 - Graphical Models for Chains, Trees and Grids
17:00 - Quantitative Probability - quite a dry topic for 5pm on Tuesday with the Sun belting in...

Day 3:

09:00 - 3D Object Reconstruction - Matlab based lab session.
13:30 - Motion & Tracking
15:30 - Performance Evaluation
17:00 - Vision Algorithms

Day 4:

09:00 - Shape & Appearance Models
11:00 - Machine Learning for Computer Vision - Presented by my PhD supervisor, speaking to the other students they consistently agreed that this was the best lecture of the week.
13:30 - Local Feature Descriptors
15:30 - Structure from Motion - Covered the basics of camera calibration and SfM well with some very impressive state of the art results. Very useful for my work.
17:00 - Real-time Vision - Some useful info about optimisation and things to consider when trying to make a system real-time.

Day 5:

09:00 - Matlab Lab
11:00 - From Lab to Real-World - Some interesting info about non-linear solvers, presented by +Andrew Fitzgibbon from Microsoft Research.

Summary

It was a cracking week, lots of learning and most of all meeting some great people all at about the same stage of their research. Some lectures were a bit hit and miss - it's probably quite hard to pitch a good lecture to so many different knowledge levels and areas of interest.

I personally, and I know others did too, got more from the week by meeting other students and finding out about their work by chatting in the bar over a G&T.

BMVA 2013 Poster

The Poster...