Since the nomination and voting process is completely open, I hope there would be no complaints on merits and criteria.
I plan to collect the nominations after a week and put them into a poll list using Blogger vote gadget, something like on the picture below:

Multiple choices will be allowed, so if someone hesitates between two or three candidates, she/he can vote for all. One thing I worry of is that big organizations like Omnivision or Aptina can promote their papers over smaller players, such as Siliconfile or CMOSIS. My hope is that purely technical considerations would prevail over corporate solidarity.
OK, let's start. I will post my candidates in the comments below.





