Message from the General Chair

The Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA) Conference took place place at the Rydges Lakeside in Canberra, Australia from the 1-3 December 2008. Since 1991, DICTA has been the main Australian venue for the presentation of advances and research results on digital image computing. From its establishment, DICTA has been a biannual meeting. In 2008, it will turn into an annual conference. This year, the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition) endorsed the meeting, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc) published the proceedings and the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) will publish a selection of the best papers in a special issue of a Special Issue in its Computer Vision Journal. In 2008, DICTA had 146 submissions and was sponsored by CiSRA (Canon Information Systems Research Australia), NICTA (National ICT Australia) and DSTO (Defence Science and Technology Organisation). Each submitted manuscript was reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Accepted papers meet the DEST E1 requirements and were organised into a number of oral and poster sessions. This year, the chairs took special care in being inclusive and creating links between distinct topics such as image coding, tracking and surveillance, medical imaging and remote sensing. In this regard we took particular interest in encouraging links between researchers in areas related to computer vision and graphics who have common problems and frequently use similar techniques. There were also sessions on segmentation and geometry, which are classical problems in computer vision and pattern recognition. The conference included four keynote addresses by Peter Corke, P. Anandan, Fatih Porikli and Rama Chellappa.