in conjunction with the

IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2022  

Workshop Website: https://machinelearning.uniud.it/events/CV4WS-2022/

Call for Papers

Winter sports such as skiing, bobsleigh, ice-skating and ice-hockey are popular winter activities. To improve human well-being and sociality, different winter sport federations want to promote such sports by increasing the people engagement in them. This is mostly obtained by the broadcasting of professional competitions. Indeed, the TV transmission of only alpine and nordic skiing competitions attracts around 6 billions of viewers (source: International Ski Federation – FIS – 2019/2020 season reports) including many new potential practitioners.

Increased interest towards the winter disciplines can be achieved by enhancing the viewing experience of the spectators through richer broadcasting contents and higher athlete performance, and these can be driven by yet-to-come video technologies. The most common solutions available today to analyze the athlete performance are based on sensors like IMUs or GNSS. Image and video analytics is not a predominant technology in the winter sports domain yet, even though a large amount of visual data is available through broadcast videos or can be generated at a cheap cost with standard cameras. We believe this gap is in part due to the challenging settings that the snowy and icy environments set when they are imaged with continuously moving cameras. These issues must be then considered in relation to the real-time processing requirements of broadcasting applications or the decision-making processes performed during the trainings. We believe that the problems arising in these domains offer particular and stimulating challenges that would lead to relevant contributions to the computer vision field.

For these motivations, the goal of our workshop is twofold: on one hand to promote the employment of computer vision and AI solutions in the winter sports industry, by presenting the latest research solutions for winter sports-related problems; and at the same time, we would like to stimulate the interest of the computer vision and AI audience with new and interesting problems that could lead to the engagement of researchers and the development of new solutions. Hence, we invite researchers and engineers interested in these topics to join our workshop, submitting ongoing and recently published ideas, demos, and applications in support of increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of computer vision technologies in the winter sports domain.

Research papers are solicited in, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

·       Machine learning solutions for video understanding or activity recognition regarding winter sports

·       Pose estimation of athletes

·       Evaluation and measurement of athlete performance

·       Performance forecasting

·       Detection/evaluation/prevention of injuries in winter sports with computer vision

·       Crowd and spectators monitoring

·       Augmented/virtual reality for winter sports and fan engagement

·       Applications of computer vision/AI to winter sports (skiing, ice-hockey, ice-skating,

·       biathlon, bobsleigh, luge, curling, etc.).

·       Image/video understanding in winter/harsh weather conditions

·       Camera pose estimation in broadcast videos

·       Video-based trajectory reconstruction and analysis

·       Winter scene reconstruction from images/videos

·       Snow/ice measurements and analysis with computer vision

·       Real-time processing algorithms

·       Fusion of image/video data and other sensor data

·       Datasets, benchmarks and annotations of winter sport data

There will be two submission tracks: full papers and extended abstracts.

Full paper submissions should propose comprehensive and well-validated solutions, and adhere to the guidelines of standard WACV 2022 submissions (max 8 pages + references). Accepted full papers will be published under the WACV 2022 Workshops Proceedings and included in IEEE Xplore.

Extended abstracts should be max 4 pages in length (including tables, figures and references) and can describe novel but not extensively validated ideas, on-going works, or be recaps of recently published papers (either journal or conference). The accepted abstracts will be published under an arXiv compendium.

All submissions should be compiled for double-blind review, adopt the standard WACV 2022 template (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/wacv-2022-author-kit-template/cpnsmqvrczmz), and be submitted via the workshop's CMT platform: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CV4WS2022.

Important dates for full paper submissions:

·       November 1, 2021 23:59 PST: full paper submission due

·       November 14, 2021: notification to authors of full paper submissions

·       November 17, 2021 23:59 PST: camera-ready full papers due

Important dates for extended abstract submissions:

·       November 30, 2021 23:59 PST: extended abstract submission due

·       December 12, 2021: notification to authors of extended abstract submissions

·       December 15, 2021 23:59 PST: camera-ready extended abstract due

Workshop date:

·       January 8, 2022 (Morning)

Organizers

Matteo Dunnhofer, University of Udine, Italy

Prof. Nicola Conci, University of Trento, Italy

Prof. Christian Micheloni, University of Udine, Italy

Please consider sharing this e-mail with potentially interested colleagues of yours. Thank you.