According to the founding documents, the objective of the CBA is "to create the know-how needed for an operative and sensible use of digital image analysis in society, particularly in the fields of environment and medicine.'' We are pursuing this objective by running a large number of research projects ranging from fundamental mathematical methods development to application tailored developments and tests, the latter mainly in biomedicine and forestry. Since a large portion of our work deals with images with at least 3D, the research in graphics and visualization that is also part of CBA finds direct applications in our own work.
We also used to have substantial activity in remote sensing but were not able to obtain funding to replace the position held by Tommy Lindell after his retirement. He still runs a few projects but the activity is much lower than earlier. During 2006, we have had discussions with the Faculty of Science and Technology at UU about the possibility of moving the research in Geoinformatics to CBA and thus reviving the remote sensing. Hopefully, that will lead to some favourable decisions during 2007.
We are 10 professors (assistant, associate and full) with PhDs who carry out our research at CBA. We are all involved with supervision of PhD and Master thesis students although to quite varying degrees. We do not have 10 distinct research groups, there is a lot of interaction between the different researchers and for each new project usually a new combination of researchers from CBA and from other collaboration partners is formed.
During this year, twelve Master thesis projects were completed with supervision from CBA. They covered a wide range of topics. Some projects were related to our own research while other were trying to solve problems for industry or in biomedical research, in a few of the cases the results were directly applied in new products or services. In Section 3.2, we give a presentation of the different master thesis projects.
In addition to this, our PhD students and senior researchers worked on 33 different projects as described in Section 5. In the rest of this section, we will briefly outline the different projects we have been involved with. The order follows roughly that of Section 5 and is somewhat arbitrary although we have tried to group similar projects under headings that roughly describe our different research areas starting with more theoretical work before moving on to more applied. Some projects could fit under several headings though. It is also worth noting that the projects do not cluster according to host university, there are researchers from both universities active in almost all our research areas.