Winner of the ACM TOMCCAP Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award

In its initial year the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award goes to the paper Video Quality for Face Detection, Recognition and Tracking (TOMCCAP vol 7. no.3) by Pavel Korshunov and Wei Tsang Ooi.

( Dr. Pavel Korshunov )		( Dr. Wei Tsang Ooi )

The winning paper is pioneering because it is the very first study which tries to determine an objective quality threshold value for videos used in automated video processing (AVP). The

paper proves that if a video’s quality is below a certain threshold (it gives the actual values for this threshold based on video context), it cannot be used in AVP systems. Further, it is shown that

AVP systems still work with reasonable accuracy even when the video quality is low from a human’s perspective. This is an important finding because it means we can reduce quality and bit rate of the video without sacrificing accuracy, leading to reduced costs, greater scalability, and faster processing. What is unique about the paper is that it distinguishes between quality as perceived by humans, versus quality as perceived by AVP systems. In essence, the paper proposes that for AVP systems we should design machine-consumable video coding standards, not human-consumable codes.

The purpose of the award is to recognize the most significant work in ACM TOMCCAP in a given calendar year. The whole readership of ACM TOMCCAP was invited to nominate articles which were published in Volume 7 (2011). Based on the nominations the winner has been chosen by the TOMCCAP Editorial Board. The main assessment criteria have been quality, novelty, timeliness, clarity of presentation, in addition to relevance to multimedia computing, communications, and applications.

The award honors the founding Editor-in-Chief of TOMCCAP, Nicolas D. Georganas, for his contributions to the field of multimedia computing and his significant contributions to ACM.  He influenced the research and the multimedia community exceedingly.

The Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Steinmetz and the Editorial Board of ACM TOMCCAP cordially congratulate the winner. The award will be presented to the authors on November 1^st 2012 at the ACM Multimedia 2012 in Nara, Japan and includes  travel expenses for the winning authors.