ACM workshop on 3d object retrieval: 3DOR'10 chair's welcome

3D media has emerged rapidly as a new type of content within the multimedia domain. The recent acceleration of 3D content production, witnessed across all fields up to user-generated content, is causing a huge amount of traffic and data stored and transmitted using Internet technologies. Recent advances in 3D acquisition and 3D graphics rendering technologies boosted the creation of 3D model archives for several application domains. These include archaeology and cultural heritage, computer-assisted design (CAD), medicine and bioinformatics, 3D face recognition and security, entertainment and serious gaming, spatial data and 3D city management.

Search engines will soon become a key interaction tool for engaging with this data deluge, and 3D content-based retrieval methods will be crucial in the development of effective 3D search engines: visual media are meant to be seen and should be searched accordingly.

3D content-based retrieval is attracting researchers from different fields: computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and the semantic web. Since 2008, a series of workshops specifically devoted to the topic was initiated under the auspices of the Eurographics association. The first EG 3D Object Retrieval (3DOR) workshop took place in Crete, April 2008, followed by 3DOR'09 in Munich, March 2009, and 3DOR'10 in Nörkopping, May 2010. The response of the community in all these years was encouraging in terms of number of submission and attendance rate. Due to the co-location of the 3DOR workshop with the Eurographics conference, the events primarily addressed the computer graphics community.

Now, the co-location with ACM Multimedia 2010, the worldwide premier multimedia conference, gave us the opportunity to meet the multimedia community and further promote a cross-fertilization ground that hopefully will stimulate further discussions on the next steps in this important research area. The response to the call for participation was a success: even if scheduled shortly after the EG 3DOR'10 workshop, the ACM 3DOR'10 received 24 full paper submissions on various topics related to 3D retrieval, ranging from new indexing methods for generic 3D models to context-specific methods, such as face recognition and molecular data analysis. Out of the 24 submissions received, 7 contributions were accepted as oral papers (acceptance rate 30%), and 7 as poster papers.

The ACM 3DOR'10 workshop will feature a one-day technical programme, with the presentation of the full papers and poster session. The invited talk given by Prof. Anuj Srivastava on Elastic Riemannian Frameworks and Statistical Tools for Shape Analysis complements the programme.

The 3D Object Retrieval workshops gathered and continues to gather great interest in the research community and there are several people we would like to thank for keeping alive this interest: first of all, we would like to acknowledge and thank Ioannis Patrikakis (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece) and Theoharis Theoharis (University of Athens, Greece) for having started the 3DOR workshop series; Alberto Del Bimbo, for the encouragement to bring 3DOR closer to ACM Multimedia 2010; the ACM - 3DOR'10 PC members and reviewers for their efforts and commitment; all the authors of the submitted papers that are demonstrating the importance of the topic. We would like to thank the Institut TELECOM for the financial support. We look forward to the next event on 3D Object Retrieval.