  A negative result is when the outcome of an experiment or a model is not what
is expected or when a hypothesis does not hold. Despite being often overlooked
in the scientific community, negative results are results and they carry value.
While this topic has been extensively discussed in other fields such as social
sciences and biosciences, less attention has been paid to it in the computer
vision community. The unique characteristics of computer vision, particularly
its experimental aspect, call for a special treatment of this matter. In this
paper, I will address what makes negative results important, how they should be
disseminated and incentivized, and what lessons can be learned from cognitive
vision research in this regard. Further, I will discuss issues such as computer
vision and human vision interaction, experimental design and statistical
hypothesis testing, explanatory versus predictive modeling, performance
evaluation, model comparison, as well as computer vision research culture.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition