Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Section on CVPR Papers

. Bastian Leibe, Konrad Schindler, Nico Cornelis, and Luc Van Gool, “Coupled Object Detection and Tracking from Static Cameras and Moving Vehicles,” winner of the Best Paper Prize, sponsored by Siemens and ObjectVideo. . Anat Levin, Alex Rav-Acha, and Dani Lischinski, “Spectral Matting,” winner of the Best Paper Prize Honorable Mention, sponsored by Honeywell and Siemens. . Oncel Tuzel, Fatih Porikli, and Peter Meer, “Pedestrian Detection via Classification on Riemannian Manifolds,” winner of the Best Paper Prize Honorable Mention, sponsored by Honeywell and Siemens. . Yuan Li, Haizhou Ai, Takayoshi Yamashita, Shihong Lao, and Masato Kawade, “Tracking in Low Frame Rate Video: A Cascade Particle Filter with Discriminative Observers of Different Life Spans,” winner of the Best Student Paper Prize, sponsored by IBM and the International Journal of Computer Vision. Of the roughly 1,250 papers submitted to CVPR 2007, 60 were accepted as orals. During the Area Chair meeting, the Area Chairs and Program Chairs generated a short list of eight papers to be considered for awards. These papers were all read carefully by a committee of five senior members of the vision community in order to obtain an independent evaluation. The award committee members did not serve as Area Chairs for CVPR 2007 and included past recipients of best paper awards at leading vision conferences. Each member of the awards committee ranked the papers and provided justification of the ranking to the Program Chairs. The Program Chairs made the final decisions based on the input of the awards committee. Fortunately, the opinions of the committee were remarkably consistent and this decision was probably the easiest made by the Program Chairs in the entire process. The authors of the award-winning papers and honorable mentions were invited to submit an extended version of their paper as a journal submission. The papers were reviewed by expert reviewers in the field, following the usual TPAMI procedure. All of the papers were accepted, in most cases after relatively minor revisions. In addition to the awards appearing in this special section, CVPR 2007 also presented the Longuet-Higgins Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision that have withstood the test of time. The prize, sponsored by GE and Microsoft, was awarded to two papers that were published in CVPR 1997: “Training Support Vector Machines: An Application to Face Detection,” by E. Osuna, R. Freund, and F. Girosi, and “Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation,” by J. Shi and J. Malik.