The 13th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis IWCIA'09 will be held in Mexico, November 24-27, 2009. More precisely, the Workshop will take place in a hotel in the international tourist zone known as the Riviera Maya, which is situated on the northeast coast of the Yucatan peninsula, and includes Cancun to the north and Playa del Carmen to the south.

Previous meetings were held in Paris (France) 1991, Ube (Japan) 1992, Washington DC (USA) 1994, Lyon (France) 1995, Hiroshima (Japan) 1997, Madras (India) 1999, Caen (France, 2000), Philadelphia (USA, 2001), Palermo (Italy, 2003), Auckland (New Zealand, 2004), Berlin (Germany, 2006), and Buffalo (USA, 2008).



Scope

Image analysis is a scientific discipline providing theoretical foundations and methods for solving problems appearing in a range of areas as diverse as biology, medicine, physics, astronomy, geography, chemistry, robotics and industrial manufacturing. The workshop will focus on the analysis of digital images. Besides traditional approaches based on continuous models, which require numeric computation, and which always involve the problem of rounding and approximation, "combinatorial" approaches to image analysis (also named "discrete" or "digital" approaches) have been developed during the last 50 years. These latter approaches are based on studying combinatorial properties of the digital data sets under consideration and generally provide useful algorithms for image analysis which are more efficient and accurate than those based on continuous models. Some recent combinatorial approaches aim at a self-contained digital topology or/and geometry (independent of Euclidean space), which might be of interest and importance, not only for image analysis but also for example, within mathematical physics, for the development of digital models of space-time.

The purpose of the 13th IWCIA is to bring together scientists working on mathematical and computational foundations of digital image analysis as well as on applications, for the interchange of ideas, the reporting of new results and the discussion of open problems.

Repeating a format realized for the first time by the IWCIA'08, the workshop will have a Special Track on Applications, which will be held in a session parallel to the Theoretical Track.

To maintain the highest possible standards, all submitted papers will be reviewed double-blind by at least three independent reviewers. The review will be rigorous and based on criteria related to the relevance (for the workshop topics), originality, technical correctedness and mathematical depth, clarity and quality of presentation. In the case of algorithms or reports on computer systems for image analysis, its efficiency and overall performance will be also important. There will be no opportunity for major revisions. Each reviewer will provide an overall score, which will collectively determine acceptance or rejection.

Following the tradition of past IWCIA workshops, accepted papers will be published in Springer's "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series. After the excellent experience of IWCIA'08, papers for the track on applications will be published by Research Publishing Services (Singapore).


After the Workshop, the organizing committee will make every effort to arrange the publication of the best ranked papers in special issues of high quality international journals.