The Centre for Image Analysis (CBA) is a joint university entity between Uppsala University (UU) and the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU). The main activities at CBA is graduate education and research.
During 2002, there were a number of examinations, but also other notable achievements by CBA people. There was one dissertation, at the Faculty of Forestry, SLU (Mattias Aronsson), and one Licentiate exam at the TN-faculty, UU (Anders Hast). Fredrik Bergholm was promoted to Professor and Ingela Nyström became Docent in image analysis at CBA. Ingela Nyström was elected President of the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis, and Stina Svensson became its Secretary/Treasurer. In addition, Stina Svensson became one of two founding co-chairs of the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee for Discrete Geometry.
How many we are at CBA is a question with several answers. If we count everybody ``in house'' for at least part of their time we were 24 persons 20030101. In addition we supervise two PhD students at University College of Gävle. The employees are formally employed at either university. The whole of CBA is administrated through UU.
All personnel at CBA also participates, more or less intensely, in undergraduate education, mainly through the large Dept. of Information Technology at UU. There is also an undergraduate course at SLU.
Image analysis is in its essence interdisciplinary, its foundations being in mathematics, statistics, physics, and computer science, and its applications -- in our case -- ranging from shape analysis of HIV viruses to detection of coral bleaching in tropical seas. This may seem like a too wide area of research, but, in fact, we do concentrate on two areas of basic research and on applications suitable for these. The areas are volume (three-dimensional) images, e.g., tomographic images of the human body; and spectral/hyperspectral images, that is images with 3-200 layers, where each layer represents a specific colour. Such images are, e.g., used to detect water pollution.
Generally speaking image analysis is a different subject than computer graphics and visualisation. CBA has, however, ever since its start, taken the responsibility for undergraduate education at UU in computer graphics and carried out some projects in graphics and visualisation. When, in 2002, UU finally created a Chair in Computer Graphics and Visualisation (jointly with University College of Gävle) it was decided that the chair was to be placed at CBA, when occupied (from 20030101). As a consequence, the UU PhD subject ``Computerized image analysis'' was widened to ``Computerized image processing'', since the latter subject also can include graphics and visualisation. The PhD subject at SLU is still ``Image Analysis''.
Most of the application projects are carried out in close co-operation with researchers from other research areas. We also co-operate internationally on basic research. During 2002 we had active and significant co-operation with 21 international groups in 15 countries and 44 national groups. We are also very active in international and national societies and committees, participate in international and national conferences, and give seminars in many different places and contexts, thus being part of the international community of scientists and also fulfilling the ``third'' task of the universities.
Since 1993/94 CBA assembles extensive annual reports, that describes in some detail what we have achieved during the year. These annual reports are intended for anyone interested in our work, not only financial sponsors, but users of image analysis in society and industry, co-operation partners, and research colleagues. In addition to this use, the annual reports should be inclusive enough to replace all the different summaries of our activities that a research organisation such as ours are required to give, in more and more detail, for each passing year. This is especially true for us, since we belong equally to two universities.
In the next subsection the research at CBA is briefly summarised. A more detailed description of each research project can be found in Section 5. Section 2 describes the organisational and financial aspects of CBA; Sections 3 and 4 our undergraduate and graduate education, respectively; Section 6 lists our publications for 2002, with abstracts of the refereed ones; and Section 7, finally, lists all the various activities we participate in. Note that each Section starts with a short summary printed in a larger font than the following detailed material.