Motivation. Recent economic growth in developing regions (particularly in Asia and Latin America) together with the widespread use of technology (e.g., cell phones in China and India, ATMs worldwide, etc.) suggest that there is a huge potential for technology to have an impact on development. Since most of the world's population lives in developing regions, worldwide initiatives to bring technology to under-served communities around the globe have broken political barriers and resulted in programs and initiatives of the technical research community in many areas. In particular, research in information and communication technology for development (ICTD), whose goal is to invent technology for the sake of socioeconomic growth, is experiencing fast growth, as evidenced by a number of international conferences and workshops devoted to this topic in areas such as education, health, and several others.

Computer vision in developing regions is also experiencing fast growth, especially in the automotive, pharmaceutical, packaging, and electronic industries. Although high quality research is carried out in many educational institutions and industry laboratories in developing regions, the visibility of these efforts within the international community is rather low. Many of the projects in developing regions, however, can bring new perspectives to the international research community, because the constraints and conditions of research projects on developing regions are frequently different from what researchers in developed regions typically encounter. On the other hand, computer vision has many applications in developing regions that can have an important impact on development, e.g. manufacturing, education, medicine, natural interaction with computers, and many others.

Scope. The goal of this workshop, in conjunction with ICCV 2007, is to highlight the efforts of computer-vision researchers working with developing regions, with particular emphasis on those who have unique experience doing computer vision research in developing regions, with students and colleagues from developing regions, or on technical problems specific to developing regions. The location of the workshop will naturally draw a Latin American audience, but the workshop welcomes participation worldwide, from anyone in academia, industry, or development who resonates with these topics. The goal is to expose the international computer vision community to specific challenges of vision in developing regions, to identify specific needs for computer vision research in the context of developing regions, and and to encourage future collaborations.

To this end, we will solicit submissions that fall roughly in the following three areas: (1) computer-vision research that addresses particular problems of developing regions; (2) careful analysis of problems specific to developing regions that may be amenable to a computer-vision solution; and (3) descriptions of attempts to spread computer-vision research to a wider audience within developing regions. More specifically, the workshop welcomes papers that fall into the following categories:

• Papers that describe current industrial and academic research projects in computer vision in developing regions;
• Technical papers that discuss novel techniques, applications, systems, or theoretical frameworks that highlight challenges, research opportunities, and open issues in areas of interest in computer vision for developing regions, including low-cost vision (hardware/software) for use in resource-constrained environments;
• Applications of computer vision that address specific challenges in developing regions in
  • Agriculture
  • Automotive
  • Business process outsourcing (BPO)
  • Education
  • Healthcare/Medical/Pharmaceutical
  • Human computer interaction (HCI)
  • Microfinance
  • Mining
  • Robotics
  • Safety/Surveillance
  • Etc.
• Position papers on any of the topics above, and papers that describe experiences about teaching or doing research in computer vision in developing regions (e.g., that describe cultural and social issues in deployment and implementation of vision applications in developing regions, among others).