On Wednesday I hosted my first ever British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) one-day workshop. The BMVA are the organisation which drives forwards computer vision in the UK, and they run a series of one-day technical meetings, usually in London, which are often very informative. In order to run one, you have to first propose it, and then the organisation work with you to pull together dates, program, bookings and so on. If you work in computer vision and haven’t been to one yet, you’re missing out.
I won’t write an overview of the whole day – that’s already been done very well by Geraint from GARNet the Arabidopsis research network. So if you want a really nice blow by blow account pop over to the GARNet blog.
We had some posters, and some talks, and some demos, and around 55 attendees. The quality was good – one of the best plant imaging workshops I have been to, with no dud talks. I think London is an attractive venue, the meetings are cheap (£30 for non-members, £10 for members), and both of these factors contributed. But I suspect the real reason we had such a strong meeting was that we’re becoming quite a strong field.
The questions and challenges that come up will be familiar to people who work in other applied imaging fields, like medical imaging :
- should we use machine learning? (answer: probably)
- can we trust expert judgments? (answer: maybe… but not unconditionally!)
- we need to share data – how can we share data? what data can we share?
- if we can’t automatically acquire measurements that people understand, can we acquire proxy measurements (things which aren’t the things that people are used to measuring, but which can serve the same purpose)?
- can deep learning really do everything?
- if we’re generating thousands of images a day, we have to be fully automatic. this means initialisation stages have to be eliminated somehow.
One of the presenters – Milan Sulc, from the Centre for Machine Perception in Prague – wanted to demo his plant identification app. Unfortunately, we discover that all of the plants at the BCS are plastic. Milan disappears to a nearby florists to get some real plants, at which point, the receptionist arrives with an orchid. Which also turns out to be plastic. The lesson here? Always remember to bring a spare plant.
This workshop was part funded by my EPSRC first grant, number EP/LO17253/1, which enabled me to bring two keynotes to the event and that was another real bonus for me. Hanno Scharr from Jülich and Sotos Tsaftaris from Edinburgh are both guys who I’ve wanted to chat with for some time, and they both gave frankly excellent presentations. It was also very good to catch up with Tony Pridmore and the rest of the Nottingham group; it’s been a while since I made a conference in computer vision / plant science, as I had a diary clash over IAMPS this year.
We’re hoping to put together a special issue of Plant Methods on the meeting.