Contents


Introduction

These guidelines are inspired by CVPR’2024 Author Guidelines. BMVC Programme Chairs adapted these guidelines to achieve the goals of BMVC 2024.

Thank you for volunteering your time to serve as area chair for BMVC 2024! As an area chair, you will play a crucial role in helping us maintain the high reviewing standards of the conference. We expect you to have at least two years’ experience as a postdoc or faculty, and to regularly publish in the lead computer vision venues (e.g. Google Scholar’s top 20 venues for computer vision and pattern recognition). You will work alongside the Program Chairs to make BMVC 2024 a success and help shape the future of computer vision research.

Please note we expect all ACs to take a proactive role in ensuring papers receive high-quality reviews and meta-reviews. Therefore, you must commit to being available and responsive during the relevant parts of the review period. You must ensure availability for the periods of the 10th May to 1st of July and take particular note of the following deadlines:


Desk rejections of papers (10th - 15th of May)

Papers for which one of the following is true should be flagged by ACs and desk rejected:

Additionally, double submission is prohibited, so if it comes to your knowledge or is pointed out by a reviewer that a paper has been submitted for consideration in another venue, the paper should be flagged for desk rejection to the PCs.


Evaluation of received reviews (3rd of June then 10th of June)

At the end of the review period, ACs will do a first evaluation of the received reviews to identify i) missing reviews and ii) low-quality reviews.

A review is considered to be low-quality if the answer to any of the following questions is NO:

If you identify a low-quality review, you have to query for complement and clarification before the discussion period begins.

Note 1: There will be no rebuttal period for BMVC this year. Therefore reviews should not ask for revisions and/or additional experiments but only evaluate the submitted paper as it stands.

Note 2: The fact that a proposed method does not exceed the state-of-the-art accuracy on an existing benchmark dataset is not grounds for rejection by itself. Instead, it is important to weigh both the novelty and potential impact of the work alongside the reported performance. Minor flaws should not be a reason to reject a paper. Above all, you should be specific and detailed in your reviews.


Discussion period (14th - 21st of June)

Once all reviews have been received and you have queried low-quality reviews for complement and clarification, the discussion period begins. In many instances, all reviewers will agree, and little discussion will be needed, but for some papers, the reviewers will strongly disagree either in their assessment of the paper or, in extreme cases, over factual assessments (e.g. the novelty of the approach or technical soundness).

After the review deadline, the AC of each paper will have to initiate and animate the discussion to reach a consensus and prepare a Meta review. The discussion period aims to answer the following questions:

During the discussion, you should ensure you have all the arguments and facts to reach your decision and write the meta-review.


Making a decision (1st of July)

Meta-reviews (1st of July)

The meta-reviews are the MOST CRUCIAL aspect of the review process. This is where the Area Chair justifies their recommendation to accept or reject a paper. These meta-reviews should highlight why the decision was reached. If all reviewers agree on a paper, this consolidation report can be simple but feel free to encourage authors and provide constructive feedback. If there is disagreement on the reviews, it is the AC’s job to clarify why you decide to side with either an accept or reject in the face of mixed reviews.

Important guidelines

Note 1: For accepted papers, you should also provide a recommendation to PCs for papers that should be considered for oral presentations rather than posters. Papers that show significant progress to the state of the art and are of broad interest to the BMVC community should be nominated for oral presentations.

Note 2: We would also like ACs to rate their reviewers to allow the allocation of reviewers’ certificates and best reviewers’ awards at the conference. Reviewers should have followed the reviewing guidelines. We encourage you to read this since it may help you assess the review’s quality.

Meta-review templates

You can find below templates that can help you to communicate your decision to the authors.

1. (Rejected Paper)

This paper was reviewed by three experts in the field.  The reviewers raised many concerns regarding the paper, e.g. [RECAP A FEW CONCERNS, SUCH AS NOVELTY, EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS, ETC]. Considering the reviewers’ concerns, we regret that the paper cannot be recommended for acceptance at this time.  The authors are encouraged to consider the reviewers’ comments when revising the paper for submission elsewhere.

2. (Rejected Paper with mixed review) - please acknowledge that the reviews are mixed.

This paper was reviewed by three experts in the field. The reviewers raised the following concerns [RECAP CONCERNS]. Based on the reviews, [give a reason why you side with reviewers’ recommending not to accept the paper - in this case, you are welcome to read the paper and add your opinion as a tiebreaker]. While the paper has merit, the decision is not to recommend acceptance. The authors are encouraged to consider the reviewers’ comments when revising the paper for submission elsewhere.

3. (Accepted Paper with mixed review) - please acknowledge that the reviews are mixed.

This paper was reviewed by three experts in the field. The reviewers raised the following concerns [RECAP CONCERNS]. Based on the reviews, [give a reason why you side with reviewers’ recommending accepting the paper - in this case, you are welcome to read the paper and add your opinion as a tiebreaker]. We congratulate the authors on the acceptance of their paper!

4. (Accept)

Three experts in the field reviewed this paper. Based on their feedback, the decision was made to recommend it for acceptance to BMVC 2024. We congratulate the authors on their acceptance!