The award papers are selected by a small committee, drawn from across the field by the conference chairs of a specific conference, and as far as possible excluding those who were authors of papers in the source conference.

Following is the list of winner from CVPR 2005, when this award was first instituted.

Awarded in CVPR 2005 (from CVPR 1995)

• David Mumford and Jayant Shah (1995), “Boundary detection by minimizing functionals,”  CVPR 1985, pages 22-26.
• Ted Adelson and John Wang (1995), “Layered representation for motion analysis,” CVPR 1993, pages 361-366.

Awarded in CVPR 2006 (from CVPR 1996)

• H. Rowley, S. Baluja and T. Kanade (1996), ”Neural Network-Based Face Detection” CVPR 1996
• Cordelia Schmid and Roger Mohr (1996), “Combining greyvalue invariants with local constraints for object recognition”, CVPR 1996.

Awarded in CVPR 2007 (from CVPR 1997)

• J. Shi and J. Malik (1997), “Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation.” CVPR 1997.
• E. Osuna, R. Freund, and F. Girosi (1997), “Training Support Vector Machines: An Application to Face Detection.” CVPR 1997.

Awarded in CVPR 2008 (from CVPR 1998)

• H Schneiderman and T Kanade (1998) “Probabilistic modeling of local appearance and spatial relationships for object recognition.” CVPR 1998.
• C Bregler and J Malik (1998) “Tracking people with twists and exponential maps.” CVPR 1998

Update: The winners of the Doctoral Spotlight Awards are:

Efficient Planar Graph Cuts with Applications in Computer
Vision, by Frank R. Schmidt, Eno Toppe and Daniel Cremers

Shape Constrained Figure-Ground Segmentation and Tracking,
by Zhaozheng Yin and Robert Collins

Towards High-Resolution Large-Scale Multi-View Stereo, by
Vu Hoang Hiep, Renaud Keriven, Patrick Labatut, and Jean-Philippe Pons

Discriminative Subvolume Search for Efficient Action Detection, by
Junsong Yuan, Zicheng Liu, and Ying Wu

Each talk is 2 minutes long with 5 seconds between each talk. The slides will be on auto-play. Presentations are split among the following 4 sessions:

Session 1

Time: Monday, 7/22/09, 10:30-11:00 am
Location: Sparkle East
Session Chair: Kristen Grauman

Session 2

Time: Monday, 7/22/09, 3:10 pm-3:40 pm
Location: Sparkle East
Session Chair: Pedro Felzenszwalb

Session 3

Time: Tuesday, 7/23/09, 10:30-11:00 am
Location: Sparkle East
Session Chair: Stan Sclaroff

Session 4

Time: Wednesday, 7/24/09, 10:30-11:00 am
Location: Sparkle East
Session Chair: Bernt Schiele

Those presenting posters in the main sessions of the conference will hang their posters on tack boards. EACH POSTER HAS BEEN ASSIGNED TO A SPECIFIC BOARD (i.e., it is not “first come first served” as in previous years). Authors can find their tack board location via labels with a poster ID number. The poster ID number can be found in the pocket guide. Morning poster IDs will contain a green “AM” after the poster number. Afternoon session poster IDs will have a red “PM” after the poster number. Note that each poster will be displayed for the ENTIRE DAY. Presenters can put up their posters any time prior to their session. Presenters are responsible for REMOVING THEIR POSTERS at the end of the day of their session, so that the boards are available for use by others.

Push pins will be available on each tack board. The usable space on these tack boards is approximately 43.5 inches high x 91.25 inches wide. A FedEx printing center in the hotel lobby can print posters in one day.

Guidelines for ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Congratulations on having your paper’s selection for an ORAL presentation at CVPR 2009 in Miami, FL. As you well know, getting an ORAL presentation is a special privilege as you will be presenting to a room full of anywhere from 500-1000 people. It is essential that you take this presentation seriously and prepare your presentation to highlight the novel contribution of your research to the fullest. There are two primary aspects of this ORAL presentation. (1) Appropriate presentation materials to showcase your work and (2) Preparation, and appropriate (and repeated) practice of your presentation , to get you ready for a professional presentation of you research to a large crowd of your peers.  Here we provide some guidelines to help you do both of these.  Please pay attentions to these guidelines and recommendations.

1. Preparing Slides.

A key element of your CVPR 2009 presentation is your electronic slide preparation. The audience will base its evaluation of you and your subject matter partly on the appearance of your images. An attractive, legible, and organized presentation will reflect positively on the content, and therefore on you. Please review these basic guidelines to ensure that your CVPR 2009 presentation is the best it can possibly be:

A. Timing

Each ORAL presentation at CVPR is allocated 20 minutes. 15-16 minutes for the presentation and the rest for question / answers from the audience moderated by the session chair. Plan your talk and the number of slides to allow for a relaxed pace. A usual recommendation is of a slide per minute. If you have a lot more than that (say 30!), you will be rushing it for sure. Practice your talk before the conference. Time yourself. Think of what you would change if the presentation had to be shortened or lengthened. Force yourself to slow down a little. A rushed presentation will create more stress for you and won’t be compelling. Practice, practice, practice.  You will notice that after a few practices you will be better paced and more comfortable with the presentation.

B. Legibility (Text/Fonts/Style)

The ORAL sessions rooms at CVPR 2009 are large and can accommodate up-to 900+ people in conference/classroom style seating. Your presentation must be legible from the back row, with decent lighting. If you can stand two meters away from your computer’s monitor and easily read your slides, your text is large enough. To achieve this, limit each slide to eight lines of text or less and limit each line of text to 30 characters or less. Use a bold typeface, no smaller than 28 points, with generous line spacing. Also, remember that slides with material (text/figures) all the way to the bottom of the slide are hard to read from the back rows. Leave the bottom inch of the slide content free.

Use key words, so that your slides will be quick and easy to read. You want the audience to hear your presentation, while the slides accentuate the points to remember. Use standard fonts. That way your presentation will be truly portable. Incorporate only the essential parts of a diagram and simplify whenever possible. While it is tempting to include detail for the sake of accuracy, too much will make the slide difficult to read and become a distraction. Break up complex diagrams into sections if you can, so that each section can be made larger and therefore more legible. If you use plots, make sure axis are marked and also legible.

C. Capitalization

Avoid the use of ALL CAPITAL letters. Words written in ALL CAPS are harder to read and take up more space on the screen. Use bold face and italics for emphasis, or use a bright color such as yellow text when normal body text is white. Underlined text is not recommended as it is hard to see.

D. Color and Contrast

Make good use of color and contrast. Dark backgrounds tend to be easier to view, especially with light text and graphics. These days with brighter projectors, light background slides work fine too, If you use a light background, use black or very dark text and graphics. Do not use yellow of lighter colors for text.

Maintain consistency throughout your slides. Using the same background color, text size, text color, and uniform fonts throughout all the slides makes it easier for the audience to follow the flow of your ideas.

E. Templates

Following are templates in Powerpoint (ppt, pptx, pot, potx) and in Keynote (key, kth).  Feel free to use and modify.

• CVPR09 Powerpoint Templates (ZIPPED).
• CVPR09 Keynote Templates (ZIPPED)

Guidelines about Speaking/Presenting

Being able to stand in front of an audience an convey your message, and in this case, your research methodology, results and findings is no trivial matter. We expect all of you to take this task seriously and come prepared for a high-quality oral presentation, representative of your research, that resulted in an ORAL presentation at CVPR. Following are a few sites we have gathered to help you understand, appreciate, and more importantly learn from, to aid you in giving the best ORAL presentation possible.

• “How to Speak“ Lecture Tips (in Video) by Patrick Winston from Harvard University. [A real classic about how to give lectures in academic environments. Highly recommended.]
• “Better Public Speaking and Presentations” by mindtools.com.
• “20 Tips for better conference speaking” by Cameron Moll.
• “How to Rapidly Improve Speaking Skills” by Phillip Yaffe, for ACM Ubiquity.
• “Articles on Public Speaking” by Advanced Public Speaking Institute
• “Speech Anxiety”, “Public Speaking Panic Control Tips” by Barbara Morris
• “Things I hope to not See or Hear at SIGGRAPH” by Jim Blinn (An excerpt from the indispensable book Jim Blinn’s Corner: A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline). [Though for SIGGRAPH, these are great guidelines for any Conference Presentation.]
• “Scoring Power Points” by Jamie McKenzie