The Centre for Image Analysis (CBA), founded 1988, is a joint university entity between Uppsala University (UU) and the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU). The main activities at CBA are graduate education and research in image analysis and visualization, both theoretic and applied. On average we have 3-4 dissertations per year. During 2006, we did not have any dissertations. This is very unusual but due to the fact that we during 2004-2005 had a total of 10 dissertations, so they are simply not evenly distributed over time.
Also this year CBA personnel received a scientific award; Hamed Hamid Muhammed was awarded the Benzelius prize from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. Ewert Bengtsson was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, IVA. He will be active in Section VII, Basic and Interdisciplinary Engineering Sciences.
A big event this year was our move to new premises. Reorganisations within IT at UU had made room available in the main buildings where almost all IT-related research groups at UU are located and after much hesitation we accepted the proposal to move there. In October, we thus left the charming old wooden building where CBA has been located since 1992. The new premises have less charm but will suit our needs well and additionally offer the advantage of being closer to all other IT-related groups at UU.
Image processing is highly interdisciplinary, its foundations being in mathematics, statistics, physics, signal processing, and computer science, and with applications found in many diverse fields. We are working in a wide range of application areas, most of them related to life sciences and usually in close collaboration with experts from the particular application area. Our cooperation partners are found locally as well as nationally and internationally. For a complete list of our 34 national and 28 international cooperation partners, see Section 5.2. From a methodological point of view our focus is on discrete geometry and multi-dimensional images, both spatially, 3D and 4D, and spectrally, i.e., images with many spectral channels.
Computer graphics and visualisation are different subjects than image analysis, but at UU they have both been included under the heading "image processing'' and research and teaching in those topics is part of CBA's responsibilities. Since visualisation issues are important when working with images of higher dimensions this ties in well with our general research profile. The move to new premises makes it possible for us to realize an old ambition, to create a visualization lab. During 2006, we started our planning and fundraising for this and the work will continue next year.
CBA is only responsible for organising undergraduate education at SLU, but all personnel at CBA participates in undergraduate education. Most of it is organized through the large Dept. of Information Technology and some is organized through the Dept. of Mathematics at UU.
During 2006, a total of 22 persons have been working at CBA as researchers, administrators or PhD students. Additionally, 12 Master thesis students have finished their thesis work at CBA. This does, however, not mean that we have had 22+12 full time persons at CBA, many have split appointments, part time at CBA and part time elsewhere most commonly at the Dept. of Information Technolog. If sum up the time spent at and working for CBA, we had the equivalent of about 15 full time full year equivalents including teaching and 13 excluding teaching. The employees are formally employed at either university. The whole of CBA is administrated through UU.
We are very active in international and national societies, e.g., Ingela Nyström was President of the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSBA) until March 2006, Stefan Seipel serves as Vice Chair of the Swedish Society for Computer Graphics (SIGRAD), and Gunilla Borgefors is Area Editor for the Scientific Journal Pattern Recognition Letters. Ewert Bengtsson serves as senior advisor to the Rector of UU on information technology and also as Chair of the Virtual IT Faculty, together with many other related appointments.
Ingela Nyström was in September 2006 appointed Director of UPPMAX, the Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science, a part time position. As a consequence of this our administrator Lena Wadelius is also taking care of UPPMAX administration. We hope this may lead to increased use of high performance computing in our work in the future. Lucia Ballerini who was a visiting researcher at CBA for a number of years became docent of Computerized Image Analysis at CBA, UU.
Since 1993/94 CBA assembles extensive annual reports such as this document that describes in some detail what we have achieved during the year. These annual reports are intended for anyone interested in our work. Note that each Section in this report starts with a short summary printed in a larger font than the following detailed material.
Our annual reports have been available on the Internet since 1998. For this issue, see
http://www.cb.uu.se/verksamhet/annual_report/AR06html/