CVPR 2009 Program

• When are the reviews going to be assigned to me?
  • The Area Chairs and Program Chairs will be assigning reviewers to all submitted papers from Nov 20 - Dec 15, 2008. Papers will be available to you for reviewing by Dec 15, 2008.
• What is the first thing I should do after Dec 15, 2008, after the papers are assigned to me?
  • Go through the assigned papers quickly to check on two things. (1) There is NO obvious CONFLICT of INTEREST with this paper (see the reviewer guidelines if needed), and (2) if you for some reason thing that this paper is REALLY OUTSIDE your set of expertise (remember, we are matching to subject areas you told us about). In either case, please contact the Program Chairs instantly (email addresses will be provided!).
• When are the reviews DUE?
  • All reviews are DUE in the online system by Jan 29, 2009. No exceptions. Please meet this DEADLINE.
• Is there another review form format available for easier editing?
  • No. The review format was designed to make parsing unambiguous. We recommend saving one file for each paper being reviewed. In the file, simply replace <YourAnswer> with “Response to comment question.”
• The text file for offline reviewing seems complicated and hard to edit. Is there a simpler way to edit the file?
  • Yes. Since the format is that of XML, we strongly suggest that you use an XML editor to do the editing. Examples of easy-to-use XML editors include EditiX (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac OS X) and XML Notepad 2007 (Windows only). See the reviewer instructions, Section 4, for links to download and install these apps. Remember to edit only fields currently filled with the phrase ”REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR ANSWER”.
• Would you explain to me the point of box #5 in the review form? The blurb just before it seems to refer to question #4.
  • Questions #4 and #5 are standard questions for CVPR. This allows the reviewer to indicate confidence in the reviewing the paper. Questions #4 and #5 will NOT be seen by the authors, only the area chairs. This allows the area chairs to “weight” the reviews.For example, you may indicate in #4 “Very Confident” and qualify it in #5 by saying that “I’ve worked in the area for 12 years and am very familiar with the literature.” The area chair will then very likely listen to you much more than someone else who indicated “Confident” and said that “I have worked on this area for the past 3 years and am somewhat familiar with the literature.” #5 allows the reviewer to explain why the item in #4 was chosen (since the degree of confidence is rather subjective).

About Submitting Papers

• Can we get my quota increased for the size of paper submission from 15 MB to something higher?
  • NO. We have set hard limits of 10MB (PDF Only) for paper submission and 30MB (PDF or ZIP only) for supplementary materials for submissions for review. As we are expecting around 2000 submissions, and as each reviewer is expected to review (on average) about 10 papers, we feel that larger file downloads (and uploads) will tax the system and abilities of reviewers to get to the papers fast enough.  Authors should consider adding hi-res images as supplementary material. See http://www.cvpr2009.org/author-guidelines#SuppMaterial for guidelines for submitting supplementary material

• How do I delete Supplementary Material from the CMT site?
  • We have just added a feature that allows authors to remove supplementary files. After you log in, in the “Author” console, you’ll notice “Upload/Delete File” at the end of the supplementary file name. Click on that, and in the page that appears, you can click on the “Delete” button to remove the supplementary file. (Please note that you will not be able to delete the supplementary file after the supplementary file deadline.)

• Can we submit color images with our papers for review?

  • YES. Reviewers will get the exact pdf file of the paper you submitted, so they can see the color images on the screen.  Do be warned though that many reviews still like to read printed papers and not all have access to high-end color printers.  Please make sure to comment in the paper to request the reviewers to see the color online copy.

About Reviewing Process

• Is the CVPR 2009 Review Process CONFIDENTIAL?
  • YES, CVPR 2009 Reviewing is considered confidential. All reviewers are required to keep every manuscript they review as confidential documents and not to share or distribute materials for any reason except to facilitate the reviewing of the submitted work and to remove destroy them after review. See the reviewer guidelines, (”Ethics for Reviewing Papers. 1. Protect Ideas”). Accepted papers will be published (with appropriate copyrights) with a date of around Jun 20, 2009. Please make sure to discuss this issue with your legal advisors as it pertains to public disclosure of the contents of the papers submitted.
• Are CVPR 2009 Reviews Double BLIND or Single BLIND?
  • CVPR reviewing is Double BLIND, in that authors do not know the names of the area chair/reviewers of their papers, and area chairs/reviewers do not know the names of the authors. Please read Section 1.6 of the example paper egpaper_for_review.pdf for detailed instructions on how to preserve anonymity. Avoid providing information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs) and in the supplemental material (e.g., titles in the movies, or attached papers). Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Violation of any of these guidelines will lead to rejection without review.

  About Publications

  As the CVPR 2009 Proceedings are Electronic/Digital, why do we need to pay for extra pages on acceptance of our paper that is longer then the default 6 pages? What are these funds used for?

  • The default paper length for CVPR 2009 is 6 pages. If you submit an 8 page paper, you are increasing the work-load of the reviewers, and the cost of the reviewing and publication process. The extra page charges cover these additional costs (and effort).

  In preparing the camera-ready copy, I submitted my paper to the IEEE PDF eXpress check, which it failed.  I then submitted the example PDF from the CVPR 2009 Author Kit. This PDF also failed for the same reason. This is cited as: Error “Document contains Link annotations”. Should I ignore this error?

  • If it fails in any way, IEEE will reject it, so this error should not be ignored.  There are two primary sources of failure in validating a PDF file. The first is the use of non-embeddable fonts in figures.  Make sure that your paper uses embeddable fonts for the main text of the paper as well as the figures, figure captions, references, footnotes, etc. A second source of failure is the line in the Latex source file that includes the hyperref package.  If you are having difficulty, comment out this line (the egpaper_final.tex in the author kit has been updated to comment out this line).  This problem seems like it might be related to the second source of failure.  If you still have problems with PDF verification, you can request a manual conversion through the IEEE eXpress web site. This process usually requires 1-2 days.