The German Working Group for Pattern Recognition (DAGM) looks back on the successful implementation of the 40th German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR 2018). This year's conference took place from 9 to 12 October at the University of Stuttgart. For the second time, the GCPR was co-hosted with the International Symposium on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV 2018), the annual meeting of the Computer Graphics Department of the German Informatics Society (GI). The conference was organized by Prof. Dr. med. Andrés Bruhn and Prof. Dr. Daniel Weiskopf, both from the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems of the University of Stuttgart.

The 40th anniversary of the GCPR was celebrated by a ceremony with several invited lectures. The more than 210 participants from science and industry exchanged important innovations in image processing and pattern recognition. Artificial intelligence and machine learning were the outstanding topics here. The conference also focused on applications with special tracks in the areas of vision systems and applications, life and science, photogrammetry and remote sensing, as well as a workshop entitled "Computer Vision Challenges in Industry". Keynote speeches by Michael Cohen (Facebook, University of Washington), Raquel Urtasun (ATG, University of Toronto), Metin Sitti (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems) and Yuri Stanossek (Mackevision, Filmakademie Ludwigsburg) highlighted future trends.

Also this year, the DAGM conferred extraordinary achievements and publications by researchers in the field of pattern recognition and image processing. The German Pattern Recognition Award (sponsored by Daimler) was awarded to Angela Yao (University of Bonn) for outstanding contributions in the field of hand poses recognition and the recognition of actions for gesture control. This year, the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award was awarded to two equally outstanding researchers: Mateusz Malinowski (Saarland University) for his work "Towards Holistic Machines: From Visual Recognition to Question Answering Real-world Images" and Siyu Tang (Saarland University) for her work "People Detection and Tracking in Crowded Scenes". Thomas Hehn and Fred Hamprecht (University of Heidelberg) were honored with the Best Paper Award of the GCPR for the article "End-to-end Learning of Deterministic Decision Trees". This year's Best Master's Thesis Award went to Michael Strecke (University of Konstanz) for the work "Sublabel-accurate Convex Relaxation with Total Generalized Variation Regularization". The aim of the Young Researchers' Forum is to promote young scientists.