Preface to the Tenth MVA Commemorative DVD

MVA2007 marks the tenth of the MVA meetings. The first one was held in 1988 as the IAPR Workshop on Computer Vision at the Nichidai-Kaikan in Tokyo. From the second meeting on, it has been called the IAPR Workshop on Machine Vision Applications, or the MVA. Since then, the high quality and great influence of many of the researches presented at these meetings came to be known, leading to more paper submission and participants. So much so that we renamed it again to the IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications beginning MVA2005, the ninth of the series.

MVA has been supported by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) as well as the universities and companies that provided the venue. It also has received much help from overseas in its organization. Nevertheless, it has consistently been organized by researchers at Japanese universities and companies led by the late Professor Mikio Takagi (University of Tokyo, Tokyo University of Science, and Shibaura Institute of Technology.) Without him, it would have been impossible to carry on the meeting that is so beneficial to both the academia and the industry: uniting the diverse researchers who volunteered for the endeavor and receiving corporate financial support would have been especially difficult. Thanks to him, now the MVA Organization has been established as the organizing body; we can expect more confidently that the conferences will keep coming. However, to our sorrow, Professor Takagi passed away in February 2006. We would like to express our deepest condolences to his family.

Marking this occasion of the tenth meeting, we planned to make electronic the Proceedings of the past nine meetings that were held under Professor Takagi's leadership. Although MVA has seen some very influential research presented, as exemplified by the papers given the Most Influential Paper Over the Decade Award that has been conferred since MVA'98, we have heard some regret of limited circulation, because the Proceedings are published through Organizing Committee's own channels. Thus, it should enhance the influence of these papers even more if they become available electronically on the web.

However, although the Proceedings of MVA2005 had a CD-ROM version, all previous ones were paper only. Nor did we have any electronic original left. So we decided to scan all the earlier Proceedings to make this DVD, as a commemoration of the tenth meeting as well as an expression of our condolences for Professor Takagi. In this DVD, the papers are accessible through the Table of Contents and the Author Index. The papers themselves are full-text searchable by virtue of the OCR technology, (though not quite 100% accurate.) We also plan to make the scanned papers available on the web in the near future.

We firmly believe that the availability through this DVD and the web of the papers that were presented at the MVA meetings is what Professor Takagi would have liked. It would be our great pleasure if, through this DVD, the Machine Vision technologies developed by the authors of these papers are applied to more and more areas, leading to even greater advances of the area.

May 2007, MVA Organization