Prof. Dr. Carsten Steger, Director of Research at Munich-based MVTec Software GmbH, has been elected spokesman of the Technical Committee of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM). He is the first industry representative with a distinguished scientific background to hold such a high-profile position in the association’s history.
DAGM focuses on research and promotion of scientific work in the field of pattern recognition, the exchange of experience and the joint discussion of scientific and technical questions throughout the field of pattern recognition. The annual German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) is the most important instrument furthering these goals. In particular, the Technical Committee is responsible for suggesting future research topics. Its objective is to develop new perspectives for trendsetting work in the field of pattern recognition as well as proposals for the organization of DAGM conferences.
“The election of Prof. Dr. Steger demonstrates our company's solidarity and willingness to collaborate with the scientific community. It is also a clear sign of our technology leadership in the machine vision industry. Therefore, we are very pleased with this nomination”, emphasizes Dr. Olaf Munkelt, Managing Director at MVTec.
Carsten Steger is a co-founder of MVTec Software GmbH, where he manages the research department. He has also served as an honorary professor of image understanding and machine vision at the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2011. With more than 25 years of experience in computer science and machine vision, he is the driving force behind the development of solutions for technologically demanding customer requirements at MVTec.
40th DAGM conference
The German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM) looks back on a successful 40th German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR 2018). This year’s conference took place from October 9 to 12 at the University of Stuttgart. For the second time, the GCPR was held jointly with the International Symposium on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV 2018), the annual symposium of the Computer Graphics Special Interest Group of the German Informatics Society. The conference was organized by Prof. Dr. Andrés Bruhn and Prof. Dr. Daniel Weiskopf, both from the Institute for Visualisation and Interactive Systems of the University of Stuttgart.
The festivities on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the GCPR included several invited scientific talks. More than 210 participants from academia and industry exchanged ideas about important developments in pattern recognition and computer vision. The most prominent topics at the conference were artificial intelligence and machine learning. Furthermore, the conference emphasized applications through special tracks on computer vision systems and applications, life- and natural sciences, photogrammetry and remote sensing, as well as a workshop on “Computer Vision Challenges in Industry.” Keynote talks by Michael Cohen (Facebook, University of Washington), Raquel Urtasun (Uber ATG, University of Toronto), Metin Sitti (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), and Juri Stanossek (Mackevision, Film Academy of Ludwigsburg) discussed groundbreaking technologies and future trends.
Outstanding achievements recognized by major awards
At the conference, the DAGM presented its annual awards in acknowledgment of outstanding achievements and publications by researchers in the field of pattern recognition and computer vision. The German Pattern Recognition Award (sponsored by Daimler) was awarded to Angela Yao (University of Bonn) for her exceptional contributions to the area of hand pose estimation and action recognition. This year, two equally outstanding researchers received the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award: Mateusz Malinowski (Saarland University) for his dissertation “Towards Holistic Machines: From Visual Recognition to Question Answering about Real-world Images” and Siyu Tang (Saarland University) for her dissertation “People Detection and Tracking in Crowded Scenes.” The GCPR Best Paper Award was presented to Thomas Hehn and Fred Hamprecht (Heidelberg University) for their article entitled “End-to-end Learning of Deterministic Decision Trees.” The Best Master’s Thesis Award went to Michael Strecke (University of Konstanz) for his work “Sublabel-accurate Convex Relaxation with Total Generalized Variation Regularization.” The aim of the Young Researchers’ Forum is to encourage young academics to get in touch with the scientific community very early in their career.
All prize winners of the past years can be found on the DAGM website at https://www.dagm.de/preistraeger/ (in German).
High-level conference with experts from academia and industry
“We are very happy that, with submissions from 23 countries, the DAGM again moved one step closer to its goal of increasing international participation at the GCPR,” comments Prof. Dr. Carsten Steger, chairman of the Technical Committee of the DAGM and Director of Research at MVTec Software GmbH. “Co-locating the GCPR and the VMV led to a lively exchange of ideas between the participants from academia and industry across different disciplines. Personally, I am very happy that two women are among the winners of this year’s DAGM awards. We are looking forward to GCPR 2019 in Dortmund.”
