Special Sessions

1. Special session on Comic Computing

---

Organizer:
Abstract: Comic is a medium constituted of images combining text and graphics elements. The authors of comic use this different visual information to narrate a story. So, the terms of comic include several categories such as Manga, American Comic, and Franco-Belgian "Bandes Dessinées." Each category has its own graphic style. Also, anime is a well-known extended media of comic. From the research point of view, comic images are attractive targets because the structure of a comic page includes various elements (such as panels, speech balloons, captions, leading characters, text, and onomatopoeia.) The design of these elements strongly depends on the author's creativity and the graphic universe. Consequently, the drawings present a huge variability. Comic image analysis is not a trivial problem and is still immature compared with other areas of image analysis and pattern recognition applications. Comic offers many challenges for researchers. For example, detecting and recognizing the characters on a page of comic is not trivial since the main character can be a human being, an animal, or even an imaginary character. The "pattern recognition" task is a tricky problem in this context. Comic analysis has aroused interest among researchers in not only computer vision but also human-computer interaction, and natural language processing. The number of scientific papers dealing with comic analysis has significantly increased in international conferences and journals during the last ten years.

Topic:
- Comic/Anime Image Processing
- Comic/Anime Analysis and Understanding
- Comic/Anime Recognition
- Comic/Anime Retrieval and Spotting
- Comic/Anime Enrichment
- Interaction Analysis of Comic/Anime
- Comic/Anime Generation
- Physical/Digital Comic/Anime Interfaces
- Cognitive Processing and Comprehension of Comic/Anime
- Linguistics Analysis of Comic/Anime
- Any methods and findings with multimedia technologies and manners for comic/anime are welcomed to this session.

Submission Site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MMAsia2023.
For submission to be in this special session, please select “Special session on Comic Computing” as the primary subject area in CMT.

2. Special Session on Multimedia on Cooking and Eating Activities

---

Organizer:
Abstract: Cooking and eating is one of the most fundamental activities of humankind. It profoundly affects various aspects of human life, such as health, culinary art, entertainment, and communication. Cooking at home requires experience and knowledge. They may also need support for food-logging and menu planning for their family health. Needless to say, support for a good and enjoyable meal would improve the quality of life. Systematic cooking/eating support for elderly or physically challenged people is also significantly important.

Multimedia is a crucial technology for understanding such food-related activities. When tasting food, we use the full sensitivities of our mouths. Multi-modal sensing for food tasting is a fundamental technology to know the micro-level eating experience. Such an experience may be described on the Web, creating various content such as reviews, recipes, and any types of SNS communications. Analyzing such content gives us a macro-level understanding of the tendency of food-related social behavior. An end-to-end computation from micro-level to macro-level information is an ultimate multimedia technology. Computationally understanding such a multimedia information flow, reproducing good experiences, and changing human behavior must contribute to society.

This special session allows research groups working on various kinds of problems related to cooking and eating to discover each other, showcase their attempts, and generate bold ideas for solving problems with multimedia technology.

Topic:
- Studies motivated by ...
- Studies related to ...
Submission Site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MMAsia2023.
For submission to be in this special session, please select “Special Session on Multimedia on Cooking and Eating Activities” as the primary subject area in CMT.