A few weeks ago, I attended the 2011 Color and Imaging Conference (CIC). CIC is a small conference (a little under 200 attendees) that nevertheless commands an important role in the fields of color science and digital imaging, similar to SIGGRAPH’s importance to computer graphics. CIC is co-sponsored by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) and the Society for Information Display (SID); it has been held annually in various US locations since 1993.

I attended this conference for the first time last year. In both years I attended, most of the conference attendees were academic color science researchers (the field appears to be dominated by a handful of institutions, most notably the color labs at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Leeds), with the remainder primarily representing the R&D divisions of various camera, printer, display, and mobile phone manufacturers. There are typically also a few color experts from film companies such as Technicolor, ILM, Pixar, and Disney. I didn’t see any other game developers – I hope this will change in future years, as our industry starts paying more attention to this critical area.

Despite its modest attendance numbers, CIC boasted an impressive array of sessions, including courses, papers, short papers, and several keynotes. The content was of very high quality. The conference organizers are currently in the process of posting video of most of the conference content for free streaming and download in a variety of formats – a step which organizers of other conferences (such as SIGGRAPH) would do well to emulate.

I’ll be putting up several other posts with details of the conference content. They will be coming in rapid succession since I’m editing them down from an existing document (a report I did for work).