[Gzz] address@hidden: GI 2003 notification - #182] -- sigh

[Tuomas Lukka]

Blach... seems I and jvk screwed up in thinking that we could publish
at this conference without the relevant experiments. Well, live and learn...
I.e. *never* attempt to publish if all the parts you feel would be needed
aren't there.

        Tuomas


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Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 10:43:29 -0500
From: address@hidden
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To: address@hidden
Subject: GI 2003 notification - #182
CC: address@hidden
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Dear Tuomas Lukka -

We regrent to inform you that your paper

  182 - Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

has not been accepted to GI 2003.  

Out of the 96 submissions 32 were accepted.

The reviews are included below.


Sincerely,
Torsten Möller and Colin Ware
Graphics Interface co-chairs
address@hidden
address@hidden


---------------- GI 2003 paper 182, review 1 ----------------

Title: Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

Overall rating      2  (scale is 1..5; 5 is best)
Reviewer expertise  2  (scale is 1..3; 2 = "Knowledgable")

1. Rating

   2  (Perhaps reject)

2. Expertise

   2  (Knowledgable)

3. The Meta-Review

   Meta-Review:

   Reviewers said essentially 'cute, but does it work?'. Strength:
   interesting and novel UI method, nice algorithms for hardware-based
   implementation. Concerns: no evaluation so it's hard to believe it would
   actually be helpful, method is 'ad-hoc' rather than principled, hard to
   scale given interaction between spatial frequency and color perception. 
   The textures used seem visually intrusive. It would be difficult to
   imaging that such strong colors would be desirable as a background to
   text.

   The committee decided to reject this paper because of concerns about
   technical content, the insufficient justification/motivation, and the
   lack of evaluation. On the content side: despite all the discussion of
   how the authors strove to maintain legibility, the high-order bit for
   most of the committee was "I  would have a *really* hard time reading
   that document!". There has been a lot of work on texture perception that
   was completely ignored - most relevant is the issue of texture
   discriminability. The fact that color perception changes as the texture
   size changes (with viewpoint manipulation) was also completely ignored.
   The paper would benefit from more motivation of when this technique would
   be useful - presumably, only when parts of documents are actually viewed
   side by side, because it's highly unlikely that the background texture
   could be compared to a remembered one from a document seen earlier. So
   this approach would not be useful for the obvious case of the document
   space of the World Wide Web. Evaluation would also be very useful. 

   One alternate suggestion on approach if this paper is resubmitted would
   be to deemphasize the UI focus as being too speculative, and change the
   focus (and title) to the texture algorithm as a graphics contribution. 

   personal review:

   Strong and interesting work - original and clever idea, the results
   were compelling, the description was clear. Although there are obvious
   concerns about legibility, the authors do discuss at length how their
   design choices minimize this problem. 

   low-level:

   Figure 6 - replace XXX with [23]

   section 4.2 sentence 1 - comma between 'textures' and 'Even' should be
   period.

   section 2.1 - Interrante's work would also be a good thing to mention
   at the end of the texturing related work section (where you currently
   cite Schweitzer and Ware). For example: Victoria Interrante
   "Illustrating Surface Shape in Volume Data via Principal
   Direction-Driven 3D Line Integral Convolution", SIGGRAPH 97



---------------- GI 2003 paper 182, review 2 ----------------

Title: Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

Overall rating      3  (scale is 1..5; 5 is best)
Reviewer expertise  2  (scale is 1..3; 2 = "Knowledgable")

1. Rating

   3  (Neutral)

2. Expertise

   2  (Knowledgable)

3. The Review

   1) This paper describes a low-end hardware-accelerated implementation of
   a graphical system for identifying documents with unique background
   textures. The textures are derived from each document's hash code along
   with some heuristically selected palette of colors for each document. 

   2) It is interesting to note that a perceptual model was considered for
   the creation of unique textures. The algorithm devised is fast and
   'cheap' in producing the unique textures. 

   3) The paper is very appropriate for GI but could be slightly improved if
   it were to get published. It lacks in the following areas:
    - the description of the heuristics used for the color selection of each
   document could be expanded. The paper does not suggest what set of
   heuristics are applied
   - requiring that the display gamma be properly adjusted seems to be a
   strong handicap in the implementation. The authors do not suggest what
   effects would be created if the display gamma is not adequately
   corrected.
   - the explanation in figure 6 does not lead the reader to the appropriate
   interpretation. What is suggested in the caption is not clearly apparent.
   This figure seems central in showing the practical value of the results
   of the algorithm.
   - it would be interesting to know how 'unique' are the textures when
   somewhat similar documents are are used. 
   - the research could also benefit from a user evaluation.

   4) The content and structure are well presented. However, certain
   sections could be reduced to a couple of lines or to one paragraph (and
   replaced with content as described above). For example, the background
   material on texturing can be reduced to one/two paragraph(s), and,
   similarly the section on focus+context does not need as extensive an
   explanation since it is only used for displaying one sample output. There
   are several typos and in some cases references are missing. For example,
   reference to Nelson in figure 6 is missing ([23]). Also, the style used
   for references is not consistent (see refs 9-10, and then 10-11).




---------------- GI 2003 paper 182, review 3 ----------------

Title: Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

Overall rating      4  (scale is 1..5; 5 is best)
Reviewer expertise  2  (scale is 1..3; 2 = "Knowledgable")

1. Rating

   4  (Perhaps accept)

2. Expertise

   2  (Knowledgable)

3. The Review

   What is the main point of this paper?

   This paper proposes a system to automatically generate background
   textures for items so as to assist in their identification as particular
   elements (or types) when used in a focus+context system.  A system
   illustrating this is implemented on NV10 and NV25 architectures, and
   shown to run reasonably quickly.


   What are the significant and novel contributions of this paper to the
   field of GI? 

   This system is an interesting one, in that it looks at whether textures
   can form the basis of quick identification in a focus+context system.  I
   have a few minor concerns - e.g. I’m not sure that adequate 3D shape of
   the surface can be recovered from the texture if luminance differences
   are small (which would limit the maximum possible dimensionality
   somewhat).  But I think the general idea is an interesting one and
   deserves to be explored.


   In your opinion is this paper appropriate for GI 2003? 

   Yes


   Is this paper adequately written (content, structure, English)?

   Yes


---------------- GI 2003 paper 182, review 4 ----------------

Title: Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

Overall rating      1  (scale is 1..5; 5 is best)
Reviewer expertise  2  (scale is 1..3; 2 = "Knowledgable")

1. Rating

   1  (Definitely reject)

2. Expertise

   2  (Knowledgable)

3. The Review

   The paper proposes a way to create file-specific textures to identify
   file content. The goal is to help make it easy to identify identical
   documents when they appear in different settings. Their main example was
   multiple copies of an article stored on a computer under different
   names--can you tell by looking at the background that they are the same? 
   The algorithm can be implemented in hardware.

   The paper has very grand goals, but presents only an ad hoc result. Right
   at the point where they needed to prove their technique has any value,
   they launched into a detailed description of how to implement it.  The
   questions this approach asks are many:

     --How well does it work? Any trials, any studies, any anecdotes?

     --Do similar files look similar? Was this a goal?

    --How does this technique scale? Can you really distinguish and remember
   all these colored textures among, say, 100 different files? How much
   better is it really than color coding alone?

   --What happens when you scale the textures, for example, as they recede
   along the document wall in Figure 6? Color perception is strongly
   affected by spatial frequency, and shapes will lose their detail as the
   view shrinks. Do you really see the small and the large versions of the
   texture as "the same." Obviously you won't in the limit.

   To my eye, the textures are overly bright, bold and colorful, both on my
   screen and on my inkjet printer. This is consistent with their statement
   that "the saturations are chosen from distribution emphasizing saturated
   colors" (section 4.1). On the other hand, they claim to be using high L*
   values, much lighter than I see in the PDF file viewed on my display. 
   I'm running a PC system with a 2.2 gamma. The text is perfectly visible,
   but the background colors and textures far too prominent for comfortable
   reading, IMHO. They need to say what gamma value they designed for if
   they want a careful visual evaluation.

    I find Figure 6 very confusing. What are the little call-outs pointing
   into the document wall? Are they part of the UI, or just part of the
   illustration?  Does the user normally have both the top and bottom view
   open simultaneously?  Unfortunately, I was unable to view their
   animation, even with the latest version of the Windows Media player for
   Windows 2000. Perhaps the animation would have helped clarify the
   application, but the paper should stand without it.

   I recommend rejecting this paper as a UI paper because it has no proven
   UI value of any subtlety. The hardware implementation of a texturing
   algorithm with their specific parameters and constraints may be
   interesting for other purposes (that's not my field), but it isn't the
   stated contribution.





---------------- GI 2003 paper 182, review 5 ----------------

Title: Representing Identity by Unique Background Textures

Overall rating      2  (scale is 1..5; 5 is best)
Reviewer expertise  2  (scale is 1..3; 2 = "Knowledgable")

1. Rating

   2  (Perhaps reject)

2. Expertise

   2  (Knowledgable)

3. The Review

   The authors developed some sophisticated techniques for procedurally
   generating textures for the backgrounds of objects so that users could
   recognize them.

   The application is a focus+context document viewer where samples from
   document B can be popped up while viewing document A. The texturing
   technique is applied to the paper of each document. The user would
   presumably recognize the backgrounds of documents A and B.

   The main difficulty I have with the paper is that the technique is in a
   vacuum. There seemed to be little evaluation of the technique, certainly
   no experiment or formal user test was reported.
   I don't really know important a problem the authors have solved.
   It seems to rest on the assumption that document readers will recognize
   the texture but not the text of a document. 

   The authors speak at length about the texture intensity issues that this
   system provokes. It would be interesting to see a more structured
   analysis of these issues. As it stands, the authors' approach is mainly
   to tweak the process until it is acceptable, but there is a lot more
   going on there that might be amenable to a signal analysis approach that
   the authors should investigate more formally.











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