Conflicts with Papers Assigned to Area Chairs.

• I recognize a piece of work (ie I know the authors) should I recuse myself from the paper?  They are not collaborators and I have no financial ties or other connections with them. My feeling is that I can be impartial and handle the review but it is your call.
  • If you think you can do the review impartially and fairly, and there is no direct conflict, we think you should review this paper, as we feel you are best qualified for it.  Thanks for letting us know.
• I have been assigned a paper that might be pretty close to things I am working on at present (I don’t know for sure since I didn’t want to look at the full paper). I would like to decline handling that paper, if possible, on grounds of potential conflict of interest.
  • Thanks for letting us know.  Yes, this does qualify as a conflict of interest so we will assign to some other Area Chair. 
• I see a paper that I know is authored by a recent collaborator of mine (collaborated in last 3 years). I am reasonably confident I can still render a fair and an impartial review. But wanted to let you know.
  • This appears to be a conflict.  While, we do trust you to be fair and impartial, it is best to have someone else take over this paper.  Thanks for letting us know.  We will swap it.
• I have a paper assigned to me that appears to be very similar to one that I have just co-authored for CVPR 2009. I can be still objective in review of this paper, irrespective of my submission.
• Thanks for telling us.  We feel you are the expert in the area and trust you will do a good job. If you feel you cannot, then we will re-assign to another area chair.

Assigning Reviewers.

• What should I do with a paper with the names of the authors explicitly mentioned ?
  • Papers with authors names explicitly violate the anonymity requirement of CVPR and and will be rejected. Let the Program Chairs know the paper id. Thanks.
• What should I do with a paper that did not exactly follow the required format?
  • If the paper is still 2 column style CVPR format (missing the line numbers, paper id on every page, etc.) and not longer then 8 pages (font not too small, margins ok, etc.),  then it is fine to assign reviewers to (We don’t want to be too rigid).
• What about papers that over 8 pages long?
  • Overall, our hard-line policy is (as the authors were warned!) that the paper will be rejected. If you see a paper with just a citation or 1-2 lines on page 9, then we are letting it go. But if the paper is grossly over onto page 9, then it is a “administrative” reject.
• Is there a race to assign reviewers? If I do not assign reviewers by Dec 4, will I loose all the good reviewers for papers assigned to me?
  • No, there is NO race.  You are choosing (recommending) 5+ reviewers for each paper and on Dec 14, we will optimize the assignments based on (a) reviewer load, (b) your choice/rank of a reviewer, and (c) subject area match to reviewer. We hope this way, good reviewers per your choice will be assigned the paper you are an AC of.  However, we do not want to see all of waiting until Dec 8 and after to assign papers.
• I have scanned a paper and it seems very weak and will be rejected, what should I do?
• Unfortunately, if the paper has been submitted and does not meet a direct criteria for an administrative reject (non-anonymous, too long, dual-submission, etc.) then the paper has to be reviewed.  Give the paper a fair chance and have it reviewed.  We agree that sometimes this is a waste of reviewing resources, but we feel the authors deserve the best from us.

Assigning New Reviewers

• When should I decide to assign a new reviewer that is not in the database of reviewers?
  • After you scan a paper to see what is the content, some obvious names of reviewers will come to your mind.  Look for them in the reviewer lists.  All reviewers should be visible to you (there are over 700 of them, so it is a bit slow).  They are sorted by “subject area relevance” (matching their chosen subject areas to authors’ subject areas for their paper). If you do not see the person you wish to review the paper, then consider adding them as an additional reviewer.  Consider however that (a) this person may already have been asked to review for CVPR09 and may have declined and (b) this person may not have the time to review for this time.  So DO NOT consider that the new reviewer will agree to do this review.  Add an extra reviewer as a back-up for this one. 

Area Chairs Meeting

• When and where is the Area Chairs’ Meeting?
  • AC Meeting will be held on the GA Tech Campus, Feb 21-22 (Sat/Sun), 2009. All AC are expected to arrive on Feb 20 (Fri), 2009, and be there until the session ends on the evening of Feb 22 (Sun), which will then be followed by a dinner. All ACs are invited to stay an extra day, Feb 23 (Mon), 2009 to participate in an informal workshop on computer vision related topics.
• When should we make reservations for the AC meeting?
  • Soon you will be getting instructions from General Chair Jim Rehg and Finance Chair Terry Boult about how to plan for your travel and how you will be reimbursed.

We would like to thank you for agreeing to review for CVPR2009. Please read the following instructions about how to review papers using the CVPR2009 submission and reviewer system. In addition, please see the Reviewer Guidelines and FAQs.

• REMEMBER: Reviews are DUE 5pm Pacific Standard Time (PST) Jan 29, 2009.
• The submission site is https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CVPR2009/ (bookmark or save this URL!).
• Please make sure that your browser has cookies and Javascript enabled.
• Please add “cmt@microsoft.com” to your list of safe senders to prevent important email announcements from being blocked by spam filters.
• Do not create a new account! You will have the opportunity to change your contact email/account name after you log in using the email address we used to contact you.

Important things to remember:

1. If you have forgotten your password, go to the main page, click “Reset Your Password” and follow instructions to get a password sent to the email address we used to contact you on 10/17/2008.
2. Log in and go to “Edit Contact Information” (item near the top right in the submission site). Don’t forget to click the “Update” button to save the edited information. If you wish to change the contact email address (and hence account name), you can modify it via the “Change your Email” box.
3. Click on “Reviewer” link. When in doubt, click on this “Reviewer” link, as it always brings you to the reviewer console.
4. Please enter the following information in order (see pink bar): conflict domain, reviewer type, subject areas. Note that when specifying subject areas, you indicate only one “primary” subject area and any number of “secondary” subject areas. Please pay extra attention in selecting your subject areas, as this information is critical in allowing us to properly assign papers to you. Caution: you cannot pick the “primary” subject area as a “secondary” subject area; if you do this, the system will not allow you to save. For example, if you had picked “Face and Gesture” as the “primary” area, you cannot pick “Face and Gesture” as a “secondary” area.
5. Since this site is new for CVPR, please read all instructions carefully. Note that edited information is not saved until you click the “Save Changes” or “Update” button.
6. If you do not enter your conflict domain, reviewer type, and subject areas by 5 PM Nov. 24 (Pacific Standard Time)/1 AM Nov. 25 (GMT), you will be removed as a reviewer.
7. For your reference, the paper submission guidelines can be found here.

Discussions with Area Chairs via a NEW bulletin board:

In our invitation, we mentioned that we expect reviewers to work with area chairs to clear up confusions and reach consensus on papers. This new site has an electronic bulletin board feature that allows area chairs to contact reviewers anonymously. Once the area chair posts a note, reviewers will be notified and asked to log in to see the post and respond. The identities of the reviewers will be hidden from each other.

Once you’ve been notified that the papers have been assigned to you, please log in to the site and follow these steps:

1. Download papers and check for possible conflict or submission rule violation:

• Click on “Paper Reviews and Discussions”.
• In the “Paper Reviews and Discussions” page, click on “Download Assigned Papers”. This allows you to download a zip file containing all the papers plus supplementary files (if available).
• Contact the program chairs immediately (cvpr09-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com) if:
  1. You think you are in any way conflicted with the paper.
  2. There is a violation of the stated paper submission rules.
  • Such a violation include:
    • Not anonymous (names listed on front page),
    • Over 8 pages,
    • Is double submission,
    • Supplementary material includes newer version of the paper.
  • Please specify the exact nature of the violation.
  • For your reference, the paper submission guidelines can be found here.

2. Familiarize yourself with the “Paper Reviews and Discussions” page (part of which shown below):

• Please ignore all references to “bids” (these references will be removed).
• “Paper Summary” label: next to it, you’ll see the icons ”+” and ”-”. Clicking on ”+” shows you all the abstracts; clicking on “-” collapses all them back.
• At the end of each paper title, you’ll see “+” as well. This has the same function of showing the abstract for that paper, toggling to “-” at the same time, which collapses it when selected.
• Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the table entries; clicking on any of the column heading (e.g., “Paper ID” or “Rank”) sorts according to its description.

3. Review papers:

• For a paper, under the review column, click “Add” (to the right of the “Review” line) to review. Please read instructions carefully. Please see the Reviewer Guidelines AND take each review seriously.  Authors are counting on you for a fair and thorough review.
• Currently, CMT does not allow users to type in certain characters into a text box that could be interpreted as html tags (for example, “y<x”) or a malicious script. As a workaround, introducing spaces between these characters (for example, “y < x”) will allow you to submit the text since this can no longer be interpreted as an html tag.
• If you save your review as a draft, it is visible only to you. You can access your draft review form by clicking on the same “Add” link. To make the review visible to the area chair, click on the “Submit” button in the review form. “Submit” won’t work if any of the required items is not filled.

4. (Optional) Review papers offline:

• You have two options to access the “Offline Reviewing” page: (1) In the “Paper Reviews and Discussions” page, click on “Review papers offline” link near the top of the page, or (2) In the “View/Edit Review” page, click on “offline reviewing” link.
• In the “Offline Reviewing” page, you can download one review template file for a single paper, several papers, or all the papers. We suggest that you download a review template file for each paper to avoid confusion.
• Please read instructions on how to modify the file to incorporate your responses. Note that you must not add certain characters in your responses that could be interpreted as html tags or a malicious script. See item 3 above.
• You can upload the completed file using the “Upload” interface at the bottom of the page. The new uploaded version will (destructively) overwrite the current review.
• We suggest that you try downloading a review template file for one paper, enter test responses, and upload to get a sense of how it works.
• You should always verify the review after uploading (by inspecting it online).
• We suggest that you use an XML editor to edit the file, for example: EditiX (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac OS X) or XML Notepad 2007 (Windows only). (Remember to edit only fields currently filled with the phrase ”REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR ANSWER”.)

5. (Optional, for originally assigned reviewer ONLY) Assign external reviewer:

• This feature is to be used sparingly. Use it only when you know someone else who is substantially more qualified than you in reviewing the paper and that he/she is willing to review the paper. You are ultimately responsible for the timeliness and quality of the review. You will hear from us if you use this feature for many of the papers assigned to you.
  
• In the “Papers Reviews and Discussion” page, you are given the option to assign an external reviewer for any paper. Under the “Review” column, click “Assign” to the right of “External Reviewer”.
• Follow the instructions. You will be asked to supply the email address of the external reviewer. This email address will be the account of this external reviewer. IMPORTANT: Check with this external reviewer if he/she already has a CMT account; if so, make sure you use the exact email address associated with this account. Otherwise, you will be unnecessarily creating a new account for this person and resulting in delays.
• Ask the external reviewer to log in to the CMT site (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CVPR2009) using the instructions in this page (http://www.cvpr2009.org/reviewer-instructions).
• The review will be shared between the original and external reviewers; both can see and update the same review.
• Later, if the area chair requests for a discussion, only the area chair, you, and the other originally assigned reviewers will be able to access the discussion page. External reviewers will not be able to participate.

6. Rank papers:

• Once you’ve reviewed the papers, you can rank them (the first being the best in your batch). In the “Paper Reviews and Discussions” page, click on “Edit Ranks” near the top of the page.
• In the “Edit Paper Ranks” page, click on the “Start Ranking” link for the papers.
• Use the “Move Up” and “Move Down” to adjust the ranks.
• Remember to click on the “Save Changes” button.

7. (For originally assigned reviewer ONLY) Discuss reviews between review deadline (5PM PST Jan 29, 2009) and 5PM PST Feb 5, 2009:

• You can view the other reviews for your papers through the “View Paper Statuses and Reviewing Data for Papers Assigned to Me” link in the “Reviewer” console.
• If the area chair decides to initiate a discussion associated with a paper, he/she will make a post for that paper, and all the reviewers will receive an email from CMT. Please do not respond to this email as such an email is not monitored. The email will have a heading like “CVPR2009: New reviewer discussion posted for Paper ID XXX”. There is a link in the email you can use to join the discussion (after logging in, you will be routed directly to the discussion page).
• Alternatively, you can log in to CMT, and in the “Reviewer” console, select “Paper Reviews and Discussions”. Then click on “View/Post Message” (in “Discussion | Author Feedback” column) for the paper being discussed.
• To see all three (anonymized) reviews, click on “View All” in the “Review” column in the “Paper Reviews and Discussions” page. Please note which reviewer you are. (Alternatively, you can select “View Paper Statuses and Reviewing Data for Papers Assigned to Me” link in the “Reviewer” console.)
• In your post (created via “Reply” in the “Paper Discussion” page), please identify yourself as “Reviewer X”, where “X” is the review with which you’re associated. Do not identify yourself by name. Once you’ve posted, the area chair and all reviewers for that paper will receive a similar notification email from CMT.
• Please conduct the discussion in a professional manner. Be aware that while the other reviewers do not know who you are, the AC (for the paper being discussed) does.
• If you gave a “Borderline” rating and at least one other reviewer also gave a “Borderline” rating: It would help the AC if you say you’re closer to accepting or rejecting the paper (based on the discussion), and then make the change to your review accordingly.
• After you’ve posted, DO NOT REFRESH PAGE (e.g., by hitting F5)! This will generate another post with the exact same message!
• You will be given the opportunity to revise your reviews as a result of the discussions, up til the 5PM PST Feb 5 deadline. To be fair to authors, after this deadline, all reviews will be frozen.
• Because of the frank nature of the discussions, the authors will not see them at any time.
• Guidelines for ACs are given here.

8. (For originally assigned reviewer ONLY) Discuss author rebuttals between author rebuttal deadline (5PM PST Feb 13, 2009) and 5PM PST Feb 20, 2009:

• The author rebuttal period is Feb 6, 2009 5pm PST - Feb 13, 2009 5pm PST. You need not do anything during this time.
• Once the author rebuttal period is over, you will be able to see the author rebuttal (but not before). We will be enabling discussions for a week past the rebuttal deadline. The ACs, at their discretion, may initiate another round of discussions to get your reactions to the author rebuttals.
• Again, because of the frank nature of the discussions, the authors will not see these discussions at any time.
• Note that at this point, your reviews are frozen and you will not be able to make any more changes to your review—we will not respond to emails regarding this matter.

Finally:

If you encounter any problems, please email cvpr09-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com.

Thanks again,

Irfan Essa, Marc Pollefeys, Sing Bing Kang
CVPR 2009 Program Chairs

Authors, please read the following instructions carefully as these are going to help you in submitting your paper for review to CVPR2009. You should also look at Author Guidelines and FAQs which will help you prepare a manuscript for submission.

1. Paper submission and review site: 

• https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CVPR2009/ (bookmark or save this URL!)
• Please make sure that your browser has cookies and Javascript enabled.
• Please add “cmt@microsoft.com” to your list of safe senders to prevent important email announcements from being blocked by spam filters.

2A. If you have been invited to review for CVPR2009:

If you have been invited to review for CVPR2009, an account has been automatically generated for you using the contact email as your account name (regardless of whether you agreed to review or not). You need to only request for a new password via “Reset your password”. If you have agreed to review, please follow a separate set of instructions. Otherwise, go to step 3.

2B. If you have not been invited to review for CVPR2009: 

If you have not been invited to review for CVPR2009, you are not in the system. Please sign up as a new user. Since this system is new for CVPR, please read instructions carefully. If you have generated an account and have forgotten your password, just click on “Reset your password”. Instructions will be emailed to you.

3. Logging in the first time:

When you log in for the first time, you will be asked to enter your conflict domain information. You will not be able to submit any paper without entering this information. We need to ensure conflict-free reviewing of all papers. 

4. Update contact information:

At any time, you can edit your contact information (see item near the top right in the submission site). Don’t forget to click the “Update” button to save the edited information. If you wish to change the contact email address, you can modify it via the “Change your Email” box.

5. Enter subject (topic) areas for your paper:

When you submit a paper, you will be asked to specify its associated subject areas. Please note that you indicate only one “primary” subject area and any number of “secondary” subject areas. Please pay extra attention in selecting your subject areas, as this information is critical in allowing us to properly assign papers to area chairs and reviewers. Caution: you cannot pick the “primary” subject area as a “secondary” subject area; if you do this, the system will not allow you to save. For example, if you had picked “Face and Gesture” as the “primary” area, you cannot pick “Face and Gesture” as a “secondary” area.

6. Requirements:

• The maximum size of the abstract is 4000 characters.
• The paper must be PDF only (maximum 15MB).
• The supplementary material can be either PDF or ZIP only (maximum 30MB).
• If your submission have co-authors, please make sure that you enter their email addresses that correspond exactly to their account names (assuming they have created accounts). This will ensure that your co-authors can see your submission when they log in.

7. Finally:

Please look at Author Guidelines and Author FAQs, which will help you prepare a manuscript for submission to CVPR2009.

If you encounter any problems, please email cvpr09-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com.

Good luck!

Irfan Essa, Marc Pollefeys, Sing Bing Kang 

CVPR 2009 Program Chairs

Submission Instructions for Review for CVPR 2009.

Following are author kits and guidelines for submitting papers for review to CVPR 2009. Papers violating the formatting rules, the double-blind or dual-submission policies, or having more than 8 pages will be rejected without review. Please see below for details. Also, see the Author Instructions on how to submit a paper for review at the Review and Submission Site and the Author FAQs

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Author Kit

Please refer to the following files for detailed formatting instructions. Example submission paper with detailed instructions: egpaper_for_review.pdf

• LaTeX/Word Templates (gzipped tar file): cvprkit.tgz
• LaTeX/Word Templates (zip file): cvprkit.zip

Formatting Instructions and Pages.

Paper length:

A complete paper should be submitted in camera-ready format. The length should match that intended for final publication. Papers accepted for the conference will be allocated 6 pages in the proceedings, with the option of purchasing up to 2 extra pages for US$100 per page (to be paid after paper acceptance, at the time of registration for the conference). So, if you are unwilling or unable to pay the extra charge, you should limit yourself to 6 pages.

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Supplementary Material

Authors may optionally upload supplementary material, which may include:

• videos to showcase results/demo of the proposed approach/system,
• images and other results in addition to the ones in the paper,
• anonymized related submissions to other conferences and journals, and
• appendices or technical reports containing extended proofs and mathematical derivations that are not essential to the understanding of the submitted paper.

CVPR encourages authors to submit videos using an MP4 codec such as DivX contained in an AVI.  Also, please submit a README text file with each video specifying the exact codec used and a URL where the codec can be downloaded.

The authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material appropriately in the paper. Note that reviewers will be encouraged to look at it, but are not obligated to do so.

Important notes:

1. All supplementary material must be zipped into a single file. Alternatively, you can choose to upload a PDF file containing any non-video item listed above. There is a 30MB limit on the size of this file. Note that you can update the file by uploading a new one (the old one will be deleted and replaced).
2. To avoid possibly over-taxing the submission site, we have allocated SIX extra days for you to upload supplementary materials. The paper for review (PDF only) must be submitted first before the supplementary material (PDF or ZIP only) can be submitted. We request that you submit the supplementary material after the paper deadline of Nov 20, 2008 5pm PST.  BUT, please don’t wait until the last minutes of Nov 26, 2008 5pm PST to submit supplementary materials.
3. Please make sure that the supplementary material directly supports the paper as submitted prior to the paper deadline of Nov 20, 2008 5pm PST. ONLY results generated by the algorithm/approach/system reported in the submitted version are allowed. Material based on improvements subsequent to the paper deadline is not allowed; sneaking such material in would be unethical.
4. Do not submit a newer version of the paper as supplementary material for any reason whatsoever. A newer version, with description of an improved algorithm/approach/system, or even one spelling or typo correction, is absolutely not allowed. Submitting this constitutes a gross abuse of the process. Reviewers will be asked to report such cases.

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Policies

Double blind review:

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.

Dual/Double Submissions:

By submitting a manuscript to CVPR, the authors guarantee that it has not been previously published (or accepted for publication) in substantially similar form. Furthermore, no paper which contains significant overlap with the contributions of this paper either is under review at the moment of submission or will be submitted during the CVPR 2009 review period (November 20, 2008 – March 2, 2009) to any of the following: another conference, a workshop, or a journal. The authors also attest that they did not submit substantially similar submissions to CVPR 2009. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.

Author’s Responsibilities

If there are papers that may appear to violate any of these conditions, it is the authors’ responsibility to (1) cite these papers (preserving anonymity as described in Section 1.6 of the example paper egpaper_for_review.pdf), (2) argue in the body of your paper why your CVPR paper is non trivially different from these concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplemental material.

PLEASE Do not leave submission-specific information (such as a paper abstract or any paper content) in the comments submission below.

• 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.

Do we need an abstract submitted by Nov 13, 2008 to be allowed to submit the final paper by Nov 20, 2008.

• YES. For each paper, you must submit its title and abstract (plain text), and its subject areas by Nov 13, 2008 (5pm PST) first. After this deadline, you will not be allowed to create new submissions. After you submit the Title/Abstract, you will be assigned a Paper #. Please make sure to refer to that Paper # in the submitted paper.  This Paper # is used to identify the paper and allows anonymous reviewing. We will use the title/abstract/subject areas you specify to pre-plan reviewers for your paper, so please provide as detailed of an abstract (not too long though), appropriate title and subject areas.

What do you mean by “Abstract”?

• Look at the example paper (egpaper_for_review.pdf). An abstract is a basic summary of the paper to be submitted that you will have in the beginning of the paper. It should summarize the basic concept of the paper, describe what is novel, and state the contributions.  The abstract length must not exceed 4000 characters.

Should the Abstract have pictures?

• NO. The abstract is just plain text entered into the form box on the submission site.

Should the Abstract have author names and author affiliations.

• NO. The abstract must be completely anonymous. Nothing identifying the authors or the affiliation of the authors or the institution where the research was conducted should be included.

How FIRM is the deadline of Nov 20, 2008 for CVPR 2009?

• NO. Extensions will be given for CVPR 2009 Paper Deadline.  Please get your paper submitted by the time indicated on Nov 20, 2008.  You are allowed to add supplemental material a little later, but the paper must be in by the deadline OR it will not be reviewed.

What is CVPR 2009 policy on DUAL SUBMISSIONS?

• Dual Submissions of ANY form are grounds for immediate rejection. By submitting a manuscript to CVPR, the authors guarantee that it has not been previously published (or accepted for publication) in substantially similar form. Furthermore, no paper which contains significant overlap with the contributions of this paper either is under review at the moment of submission or will be submitted during the CVPR 2009 review period (November 20, 2008 – March 2, 2009) to any of the following: another conference, a workshop, or a journal. The authors also attest that they did not submit substantially similar submissions to CVPR 2009. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection.

Does a departmental Technical Report with publication available online count as a prior publication and therefore ineligible to review and publication at IEEE CVPR 2009?

• A Technical Report that is put up without any form for direct peer-review is NOT considered a publication. However, as online tech reports can be searched, it is highly likely that the anonymity of the authors will not be preserved as anyone can find the paper and see who were the authors. See our guidelines for Anonymous submissions of papers, as anonymity is crucial for CVPR 2009 reviews.

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.

Working with the area chairs, we have identified over a 1000 reviewer from the computer vision community. Invitations to these reviewers to join the CVPR 2009 Review Committee are about to go out.  Reviewers can see the Guidelines for Reviewing for more information.

CVPR 09 Program Co-Chairs

Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for IEEE CVPR 2009. Your reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of the an important conference in computer vision. Your reviews also help the computer vision community as a whole to improve the quality of its research. Please read through the rest of this document that provide details on what is expected of you as a member of the Papers Reviewing Committee for CVPR 2009.  If you have any questions, see Reviewer FAQs

Timely Reviews

The deadline for completed reviews is Jan 29, 2009 . The papers will be assigned to you by December 15, 2008. So you have almost a month and half to do these reviews, please do not leave them for the last few days near the deadline. The Area Chairs have a lot of work to do after the reviews are in. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important.

As soon as you get your reviewing assignment, please go through all the papers to make sure that (a) there is NO obvious conflict with you (as in it is your recent collaborator from a different institution) and (b) you are qualified to review the paper assigned. If these issues arise, please respond right away using the system. Contact us also if you find a paper that violates any of the paper submission guidelines described in here.

We will once again be offering an author rebuttal process this year preceding the Area Chair Committee meeting. Area Chairs will also follow up with you to get clarifications on reviews and as needed, seek consensus on diverging reviews.

What to Look For

Look for what’s good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn’t be a reason to reject a paper. Each paper that is accepted should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution to the field. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the Call for Submissions.

Blind Reviews

Blind reviewing is an essential part of CVPR reviewing. Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version. Reviewers should also make all efforts to keep their identity invisible to the authors. Don’t say, “you should have cited my paper from 2006!”

Be Specific

Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying “this is well known” or “this has been common practice in the industry for years” is not sufficient: cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques! The Explanation section is easily the most important of the review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the Area Chairs decide which papers to accept, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include any specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers. For more suggestions on writing your reviews, read the section below on Writing Technical Reviews.

When You’re Done

When you have finished with your review, you should destroy any paper manuscript and/or supporting material you received. See the Ethics guidelines below.

Writing Technical Reviews

Here are some recommendations that may help you as you do this very valuable task.

In many professions, people give back to their community by doing volunteer work. In technical fields, we volunteer our time by reviewing papers that are written by other researchers in our field. We recommend that you approach your reviews in this spirit of volunteerism. Sure, your reviews make you a gatekeeper in helping decide which papers are ready for publication. Just as important, however, is to provide feedback to the authors so that they may improve their work. Try to write your review in a way that the authors can benefit from your review.

We suggest reading a paper and then thinking about it over the course of several days before I write my review. “Living” with a paper for a few days gives you time to make thoughtful decisions about it. This is the best way to come up with helpful suggestions for improving the paper. To do this, you need to carve out some time in your day to think about the paper that you are reviewing.

The tone of your review is important. A harshly written review will be disregarded by the authors, regardless of whether your criticisms are true. If you take care, it is always possible to word your review diplomatically while staying true to your thoughts about the paper. Put yourself in the mindset of writing to someone you wish to help, such as a respected colleague who wants your opinion on a concept or a project.

Here are some specific issues to keep in mind as you write your reviews:

• Short reviews are unhelpful to the authors and to other reviewers. If you have agreed to review a paper, you should take enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review.
• Be specific when you suggest that the writing needs to be improved. If there is a particular section that is unclear, point it out and give suggestions for how it can be clarified.
• Don’t give away your identity by asking the authors to cite several of your own papers.
• Don’t just suggest your past work as possible citations, as it becomes obvious that you are asking for citations to your own and results in the authors just ignoring your review as someone who is interested in getting more cites to their own work.
• If you don’t think the paper is right for the CVPR program, suggest other publication possibilities (journals, conferences, workshops) that would be a better match for the paper.
• Avoid referring to the authors by using the phrase “you” or “the authors.” These phrases should be replaced by “the paper.” Directly talking about the authors can be perceived as being confrontational, even though you do not mean it this way.

Be generous about giving the authors new ideas for how they can improve their work. Your suggestions may be very specific (for example, “this numerical solver would be better for your application”) or may be more general in nature. You might suggest a new dataset that could be tried, or a new application area that might benefit from their tool. You may tell them how their idea can be generalized beyond what they have already considered.

A thoughtful review not only benefits the authors, but may well benefit you, too. Remember that your reviews are read by other reviewers and especially the Area Chairs, in addition to the authors. Being a helpful reviewer will generate good will toward you in the research community.

Ethics for Reviewing Papers

1. Protect Ideas

As a reviewer for CVPR, you have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the papers you review. CVPR submissions are by their very nature not published documents. The work is considered new or proprietary by the authors; otherwise they would not have submitted it.

Of course, their intent is to ultimately publish to the world, but most of the submitted papers will not appear in the CVPR proceedings. Thus, it is likely that the paper you have in your hands will be refined further and submitted to some other journal or conference, or even to CVPR next year. Sometimes the work is still considered confidential by the author’s employers. These organizations do not consider sending a paper to CVPR for review to constitute a public disclosure. Protection of the ideas in the papers you receive means:

• Do not show the paper to anyone else, including colleagues or students, unless you have asked them to write a review, or to help with your review.
• Do not show any results or videos/images or any of the supplementary material to non-reviewers.
• Do not use ideas from papers you review to develop new ones.
• After the review process, destroy all copies of papers and videos that are not returned to the senior reviewer and erase any implementations you have written to evaluate the ideas in the papers, as well as any results of those implementations.

2. Avoid Conflict of Interest

As a reviewer of a CVPR paper, you have a certain power over the reviewing process. It is important for you to avoid any conflict of interest. Even though you would, of course, act impartially on any paper, there should be absolutely no question about the impartiality of review. Thus, if you are assigned a paper where your review would create a possible conflict of interest, you should return the paper and not submit a review. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) situations in which:

• You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
• You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. If you’re a member of the author’s thesis committee, and the paper is about his or her thesis work, then you were involved.
• You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement. For example, even though Microsoft Research in Seattle and Beijing are in some ways more distant than Berkeley and MIT, there is likely to be a perception that they are “both Microsoft,” so folks from one should not review papers from the other.
• You have collaborated with one of the authors in the past three years (more or less). Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgment.
• You were the MS/PhD advisor of one of the authors or the MS/PhD advisee of one of the authors. Funding agencies typically consider advisees to represent a lifetime conflict of interest. CVPR has traditionally been more flexible than this, but you should think carefully before reviewing a paper you know to be written by a former advisee.

The blind reviewing process will help hide the authorship of many papers, and senior reviewers will try hard to avoid conflicts. But if you recognize the work or the author and feel it could present a conflict of interest, send the paper back to the senior reviewer as soon as possible so he or she can find someone else to review it.

3. Be Serious

The paper publishing business in CVPR is very serious indeed: careers and reputations hinge on publishing in the proceedings, academic tenure decisions are based on the proceedings, and patent infringement cases have discussed whether something was considered novel enough to publish in the proceedings. This does not mean that we cannot have any fun in the paper sessions. But it does mean that we have a responsibility to be serious in the reviewing process. You should make an effort to do a good review. This is obvious. But one of the complaints we have heard about the CVPR review process is that some reviews can be so sketchy that it looks like the reviewer did not even seem to take the time to read the paper carefully. A casual or flippant review of a paper that the author has seriously submitted is not appropriate. In the long run, casual reviewing is a most damaging attack on the CVPR conference. There is no dishonor in being too busy to do a good review, or to realize that you have over-committed yourself and cannot review all the papers you agreed to review. But it is a big mistake to take on too much, and then not back out early enough to allow recovery. If you cannot do a decent job, give the paper back and say so. But please, do it early so that the the Area Chairs and Program Chairs have time to select another reviewer before the deadline.

4. Be Professional

Belittling or sarcastic comments may help display one’s wit, but they are unnecessary in the reviewing process. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. If you intensely dislike a paper, justify it constructively and still provide feedback to the authors.  If you give a paper a low score, it is essential that you justify the reason for the score in detail.  Just saying “I do not like this approach because I have 10+ years of experience in this area” is NOT constructive. You need to share your professional opinion. Do not just cite your own past work, it maybe true, but it seems like you just want more cites to your own work and may result in the authors just ignoring your review (and maybe the Area Chair too!).

5. In Summary

Adherence to ethics makes the whole reviewing process more complicated and sometimes less efficient. But convenience, efficiency, and expediency are not good reasons to contravene ethics. It is precisely at those times when it would be easier or more efficient to bend the rules that it is most important to do the right thing. Ultimately, spending that energy and time is an investment in the long-term health of the technical-paper sessions, the conference, and the community of computer vision researchers.

Based on Specific Documents Created for SIGGRAPH 2008 by Greg Turk (used here with permission). UPDATE and Modified by Irfan Essa.

• http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/submissions/juried/papers/instructions.php
• http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/submissions/juried/papers/review_writing.php
• http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/submissions/juried/papers/ethics.php

A few other sources of reviewer guidelines from ACM and IEEE were also considered.

The online system for Authors to upload their papers will be online by Oct 20, 2008. We are at present testing a completely new system for CVPR 2009 paper submission.

Irfan Essa, Sing Bing Kang, Marc Pollefeys

Program Co-Chairs, CVPR 2009

We have set up a largest ever Area Chair (AC) committee consisting of 46 members, who are leaders in their respective sub-disciplines of computer vision. We are working with the assumption that like CVPR 2008, CVPR 2009 will have about 1600 submissions and our goal is to reduce the papers per AC load, so that the AC can concentrate on working with the reviewers to provide the best reviews for authors.

Here are our Area Chairs for CVPR 2009.

Name	Affiliation
Avidan, Shai	Adobe (USA)
Bischof, Horst	TU Graz (Austria)
Black, Michael	Brown University (USA)
Brown, Michael S.	National U. of Singapore (Singapore)
Chellappa, Rama	U Maryland (USA)
Collins, Bob	Penn State (USA)
Cremers, Daniel	U Bonn (Germany)
Dana, Kristin	Rutgers (USA)
Darrell, Trevor	UC Berkeley (USA)
Davis, Larry	U Maryland (USA)
Dellaert, Frank	GA Tech (USA)
Dyer, Charles	U of Wisconsin (USA)
Efros, Alyosha	CMU (USA)
Felzenszwalb, Pedro	U of Chicago (USA)
Fitzgibbon, Andrew	Microsoft (UK)
Freeman, Bill	MIT (USA)
Grauman, Kristen	UT Austin (USA)
Grimson, Eric	MIT (USA)
Hager, Greg	Johns Hopkins (USA)
Hebert, Martial	CMU (USA)
Hertzman, Aaron	U of Toronto (Canada)
Hoogs, Anthony	Kitware (USA)
Kutulakos, Kyros	U of Toronto (Canada)
Lazebnik, Svetlana	UNC (USA)
Li, Fei-fei	Princeton (USA)
Little, Jim	UBC (Canada)
Matsushita, Yasuyuki	Microsoft (China)
Navab, Nassir	TUM (Germany)
Paragios, Nikos	Ecole Centrale de Paris (France)
Porikli, Fatih	MERL (USA)
Quan, Long	HKUST (China)
Raskar, Ramesh	MIT (USA)
Sato, Yoichi	U of Tokyo (Japan)
Sawhney, Harpreet	Sarnoff (USA)
Schechner, Yoav	Technion (Israel)
Sclaroff, Stan	Boston U. (USA)
Schiele, Bernt	Darmsadt University of Technology (Germany)
Sturm, Peter	INRIA (France)
Triggs, Bill	IMAG (France)
Turk, Matthew	UC Santa Barbara (USA)
Tuytelaars, Tinne	KU Levin (Belgium)
Van Gool, Luc	ETH (Switzerland)
Weinshall, Daphna	Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Wildes, Richard	York University (Canada)
Yang, Ming-Hsuan	UC Merced (USA)
Zitnick, Larry	Microsoft (USA)

Irfan Essa, Marc Pollefeys, Sing Bing Kang,

Program Co-Chairs, CVPR 2009