The historical Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta was chosen as the venue for the 16th edition of the CAIP 2015 conference. Over 135 participants from universities all around the world travelled to Malta specifically for this biennial event which is dedicated to all aspects of computer vision, image analysis and processing, pattern recognition and related fields.

Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education was chosen as the Malta partner with the responsibility to oversee the organisation of the conference. Previous conferences were held in York, Seville, Munster, Vienna, Paris, and Groningen.

The scientific programme of the conference consisted of three plenary lectures and contributed papers presented in a single track. Poster presentations were also a key element in the conference, allowing expert discussions of specialised research topics both in the main conference hall and at the poster exhibition, with professors and doctorate students mingled and discussed issues presented in their respective research. The proceedings of the conference are published in the Springer LNCS series.

Malta was represented in this conference by delegations from the University of Malta and Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education. In both institutions, research teams in the areas of specialisation of this conference are active and of such high standards that 12 papers were selected for publication by the international academic committee. This in itself augurs well and shows that Malta has come of age with the giants in computer science.

The 12 academic papers which were accepted and published in the proceedings of this conference had at least one Maltese author resident at either the University of Malta or Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education. The level of research taking place in Malta on such a specialised and leading edge area of computer science is proof that the Maltese are not only active at back office ICT roles, but are also at the forefront of the scientific world among the very best and highly resourced countries and universities of the world.

This participation and continued interest in the field illustrates the commitment of both Maltese institutions towards furthering the scientific boundaries of the academic staff as well as students. Higher education is not just about teaching but must have a substantial element of research which is of such standard that it is selected for publishing in such groundbreaking conferences and by undisputed leaders in the field.

The conference was supported by the Ministry of Finance, Malta Tourism Authority, Malta Council for Science and Technology, CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group), Springer and Juelich Supercomputer Centre. The proceedings are available as two volumes from www.springer.com under the title of Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns. The CAIP2017 will be held in Sweden.

For more information visit http://caip.eu.org/caip2015/.