For the last several years people have been talking about ‘visual computing’ as a discipline within computer science. The idea has been to bring together elements of image processing, computer vision, graphics, 3-d processing, multimedia search and all such disciplines under the same umbrella and solve common problems under these areas. I taught a course in this area in 1995 at UCSD and enjoyed teaching such a course.
Intel just announced formation of a Visual Computing Institute in Germany at the University of Saarland. Intel VP said
Given the growing importance of visual computing, it absolutely makes sense to intensify our cooperation and turn the institute to an internationally renowned center and motor of visual computing.
A good initiative