This week, Tampere hosted the 33rd edition of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) – the flagship event for the global image processing and computer vision community, running under the theme “Home of Imaging.” More than 1,300 researchers, engineers, and industry experts gathered in the city for five days of talks, workshops, and exhibitions covering the latest developments in the field.

Visy took part as a brand partner and award sponsor, and it was a natural place for us to be: Tampere has been a center for imaging technology and product development for decades, and ICIP brought that community – and much of the wider world – to our home base.

Visy’s presence at ICIP wasn’t just about supporting the field from the outside. Our CTO, Heikki Huttunen, held a position as a professor of signal processing at Tampere University, and that academic background is part of the foundation Visy’s computer vision solutions are built on.

During his academic career, Huttunen focused on applied machine learning and image processing research. This led to several industry collaboration projects and eventually led to founding the Tampere AI Hub for intelligent machines. “Tampere is a great location for working with intelligent machines, with a lively ecosystem of companies such as Kalmar, Sandvik and Konecranes in the vicinity. Combined with the Tampere Imaging Ecosystem hosted by Business Tampere, this makes for a unique environment for applied study in these fields.,” says Huttunen.

The link between university research and Visy’s product development is also why Visy wanted to participate in the award sponsorship. Opportunity felt like the right fit – it’s a direct line between the kind of work being recognized at ICIP and the kind of problems Visy’s R&D team works on.

As part of our sponsorship, Heikki Huttunen presented the Best Work in Progress Paper Award to Osama Mazhar and David Blom for their paper, “Segment-level indexing unlocks object-level retrieval under a frozen PE-CLIP encoder.”

There were altogether 68 one-page papers in the WIP category, with scopes varying from traditional image processing to computer vision and microscope imaging. The hardest part for the jury was to define the selection criteria for such a variable scope. Eventually the jury decided to focus on the opportunities for further study combined with an application-oriented scope – a valid criterion for a WIP paper. The winner is in fact a system-level work that combines many existing technologies in a novel manner and designs a fully working system from the pieces. One can think that each of the building blocks is a sprout for further work.

In his remarks, Heikki shared what the jury looked for in making the selection: the winner paper opens up several directions for further research, which the jury saw as a strength. He also pointed to what made it stand out to him personally as an R&D leader: “It’s a system-level paper, addressing a problem end to end rather than in a narrow slice. That is a genuine challenge, and it’s the kind of problem Visy’s own R&D team works on every day” Heikki explains.

Events like ICIP are a reminder that the work happening in research labs today shapes what’s possible in industrial computer vision tomorrow. Being able to support and recognize that research, right here in Tampere, is exactly the kind of connection between academia and industry we want to keep investing in.

Thanks to everyone who connected with us this week, and huge congratulations again to Osama and David!