We are pleased to introduce you to the Technical Program for the eighth ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, ACM ICMR 2018, which will take place from June 11 to June 14, 2018 in Yokohama, Japan.

ACM ICMR is the premier conference in the area of multimedia retrieval, offering great opportunities for exchanging leading-edge multimedia retrieval ideas among researchers and practitioners across academia and industry. Multimedia computing, indexing, and retrieval continue to be one of the most exciting and fastest-growing research areas in the field of multimedia technology. The Technical Program of ACM ICMR has gathered outstanding works advancing the field of multimedia retrieval with state-of-the-art technologies, which were selected through a highly selective review process.

From this year, following the success initiated at ACM Multimedia 2017, the conference invited research papers with varying lengths from six to eight pages, plus an additional one page for references. There is no longer the distinction between long and short papers but authors may themselves decide on the appropriate length of the paper. Long and short paper tracks were unified into a single regular paper track, and all papers went through the same review process and review period.

This year, ACM ICMR received 179 submissions to the main conference. After a rigorous review process by the program committee members, 68 papers were accepted for presentation including 44 regular papers, 11 special session papers, 8 demo papers, and 5 doctoral symposium papers.

Regarding regular papers, we aimed to have four reviews for each submission. We have recruited 111 program committee members to contribute their professional reviews to the submission in a double-blind manner. In the end, we received 518 reviews, which equates to 3.8 reviews for each regular submission. We, TPC co-chairs, selected 21 oral papers and 23 poster papers based on the review scores and comments. As a result, we were able to prepare a very strong technical program, although unfortunately we had to reject many good papers.