Technical staff from the Information Access Division (ITL) and Biochemical Science Division (CSTL) organized a workshop on 3D/2D Content Representation, Analysis and Retrieval in collaboration with MEL. This workshop was held April 23-24, 2007 at NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, in conjunction with Interoperability Week, which was coordinated and hosted by NIST's Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) program.
3D and 2D object models are widespread and used in many diverse areas, such as computer graphics, computer aided design, computer vision and cultural heritage, and other fields; and are less developed, but important to medical imaging, structural biology, and cell biology. Large numbers of 3D/2D images are created every day in the sciences and many are stored in publicly available databases. For scientific image data to be most useful, methods for storage, indexing, searching, recognition, clustering and retrieval of the content under study are essential. While there have been advances in the retrieval of information from text data, these methods simply can’t be extended to 3D/2D images. Search and exchange of 3D/2D object models require image-based, surface-based or volume-based features or descriptors to effectively characterize the shape, semantics, content and object topology.
The Workshop was organized with the goals of bringing the various scientific and computing research communities together to share perspectives and knowledge between the disciplines, and to increase communications among academia, industry and government. The workshop objective was to define a research agenda for the future by identifying the gaps in the resources available for image content handling. These resources include 3D and 2D databases, evaluation methodologies, algorithms, benchmarks and interoperability tools. Workshop participants helped identify appropriate roles for NIST in this activity. The workshop also included a panel discussion, to stimulate the development of recommendations.
This well-attended workshop included participants from National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, W3C, Hokkaido University (Japan), National Research Council (Canada), Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland, Purdue University, MIT, Stanford University, Drexel University, Arizona State University and the French Embassy. NIST participants included staff from following laboratories: Information Technology, Chemical Science and Technology, Manufacturing Engineering, Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Building and Fire Research, and Materials Science and Engineering.
The presentation slides and audio from workshop have been posted on the workshop website http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/vug/3DWorkShop/
Contact: Afzal Godil (ITL), ext. 4262; Talapady N. Bhat (CSTL), ext. 5448; Anne Plant (CSTL), ext. 3124