[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 147 – September 2021

Welcome to the September 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find Annual ICDAR voting results, DAS 2022 and ICPR 2022 call for papers, ICDAR 2021 nominees and related workshop information plus the latest IJDAR issue.

Please check ICDAR news page for updates, and useful links.

Looking forward seeing you at ICDAR,
Please take care,

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Message from the TC10 & TC11 Chairs: Holding ICDAR Annually

At the “2nd Future of Document Analysis and Recognition Workshop” (at ICDAR 2019), we discussed the future of our community. During 2020, we set a Task Force to continue the discussions towards the definition of a strategic plan for the document analysis and recognition community. We involved the TC10/TC11 chairs/vice-chairs and some of the previous/future organizers of our events (conferences, workshops, summer schools).

Detailed information of the activity (including kialo discussions, forms for feedback, etc.) is available at the website: https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy

A key proposal of the Task Force was to decide whether we want an annual ICDAR conference. All members in the community were invited to vote and give their opinion on the opportunity to have an annual high quality ICDAR conference. We appreciate your participation in the survey and are glad to announce that the majority (~76%) of the DAR community opted for holding ICDAR annually.

A call for bids to host ICDAR 2025 will be opened soon. Looking forward to your active support in organizing ICDAR annually.


2) TC-10 / TC-11 Joint Meeting at ICDAR 2021

We invite you to the TC10/TC11 joint meeting at ICDAR 2021 in Lausanne.
Anyone who is interested in graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) and more generally in Document Analysis and Recognition is welcome to this meeting.

Agenda : reports, updates, discussions, and vote for the venue of future ICDARs;

Everyone is invited, and should participate!

Date: Wednesday September 8, 2021
Time: 16:45-17:30 CEST
Location : Beaulieu Lausanne Convention Center -  Room “Rome” (Third floor)
Online participation : the link of the live session will be available on the ICDAR platform :
https://icdar2021.aio-events.com/

Best regards,
The TC10 team.


3) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

  • Events:
    • September 5, workshop GREC 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 6, workshop CBDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 6, workshop HDI 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 7, workshop FDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 8-10, conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • November 9-12, conference ACPR 2021, Jedu Island, Korea

2022 and later

  • Deadlines:
    • January 10, paper submission deadline ICPR 2022
    • January, paper submission deadline DAS 2022
  • Events:
    • May 22-25, conference DAS 2022, La Rochelle, France
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

4) ICDAR 2021 News

ICDAR 2021 will provide an ideal onsite and online forum during one week for scientists and practitioners involved in document analysis and recognition to exchange and discuss their latest research. The detailed program of the main conference is available online.

Concerning COVID regulations in Switzerland, the current situation allows to hold ICDAR 2021 in person and we do not expect any changes until the conference. A hybrid mode is setup with both on-site and online participants. 

Finally, please note that all registration downgrading from on-site to on-line will be accepted until Saturday 4 September 23:59 Swiss time. After that, on-site participants will be able to follow the conference on-line but will not be refunded anymore.

Looking forward seeing you in a few days in Switzerland – have a safe journey!

Best regards,

Andreas, Rolf, and Marcus

See webpage: ICDAR news


5) ICDAR 2021 Nomination Awards

The IAPR/ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition. This year, the award-winners are:

1. Prof. Masaki Nakagawa (IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievement Award)
Outstanding contributions in online handwriting beyond the Latin Alphabet, early integration of handwriting recognition in practically useful systems, and his excellent contributions for the ICDAR community, connecting us with Industry in Asia.

2. Mickaël Coustaty (IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award)
For his notable contributions in developing systems for historical documents processing and his dedicated commitment to the document analysis community

Congratulations to both of them, they will give a keynote speech to open the ICDAR 2021 conference!

See more here: https://icdar2021.org/awards/

Jean-Christophe Burie and Faisal Shafait
TC10 and TC11 Chairs


6) ICDAR 2021 3rd Future of Document Analysis and Recognition Workshop (FDAR)

Tuesday, September 7th – Lausanne

https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy/fdar-2021

Since 2017, the FDAR workshops offer a space for reflecting on the past and envisioning the future of our community. The Third Future of DAR Workshop (FDAR 2021) will focus on the future directions of document analysis and recognition, possible synergies with other communities, and the Grand Challenges that should be driving the community over the next decade. 

** Workshop format **

The FDAR workshop is a fully interactive, 100% participation event. This edition will be hybrid, so both online and physical attendance are welcome.

The workshop will have three parts:

  1. Flash talks, envisioning “possible futures” of DAR. The 5-min flash talks should focus on something tangible, with two parts:
  1. I HAVE A DREAM. What a reading machine/system will look like and how it will hugely improve aspects of our life in 10-15 years from now?
  2. CHALLENGES. What specific challenges our community will need to tackle (probably not alone) in order to get there?
  1. Work in groups. The workgroups will focus on analyzing such “possible futures” raised during the flash talks. There will be a special focus on deriving concrete actions to tackle the challenges identified, and defining strategic alliances with other disciplines and types of actors that we need to foster.
  1. Summary and final conclusions. All workgroups will present their ideas to all participants, and the final discussion stage will provide useful feedback and future directions to the TC10 and TC11 leadership.

** Call for flash talks **

If you are willing to give a flash talk, please send an email to dimos@cvc.uab.es. There will be limited time for flash talks, and we will implement a first come, first serve policy.

** Registration ** In order to best plan for the workshop given current space restrictions and to ensure that everyone can actively participate in the workgroups, please indicate your intention to attend the FDAR workshop here: https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy/fdar-2021


7) Call For Papers: Document Analysis System (DAS 2022)

DAS 2022 – Document Analysis System
La Rochelle – France
22-25 May 2022
https://das2022.univ-lr.fr

DAS 2022 will be located in the La Rochelle University, situated in a beautiful historical city on the French west coast, near the touristic harbour and close to the old city center. The city is easily accessible by train, plane, car and bicycle.

The conference will places the attendees within walking distance of a large variety of world-famous historical and cultural attractions. Participants will have the opportunity to enjoy various kinds of activities, ranging from museums to historical places, art galleries, concert halls, and churches.

DAS 2022 program will follow the traditional way, with single-track technical sessions containing contributed papers, invited talks, awards, and tutorials as with previous DAS organizations. Poster Sessions will be organized with Poster Lightning Talks in order to give Poster presenters the possibility to point out the highlights of their work to a broad audience. Special focus will be given to the Discussion Groups, which highlight and maintain the workshop character of DAS, and to discussions with industrial partners to rise current trends and challenges.

See more on the website.

TOPICS AND TECHNOLOGIES

Document analysis systems
Document understanding
Layout analysis
Camera-based document analysis
Document analysis for digital humanities
Document analysis for libraries and archives
Document analysis for the internet
Document analysis for mobile devices
Document authentication
Document datasets
Document image watermarking
Document retrieval
Deep learning for document analysis systems
Information extraction from document images
Graphics recognition
Table and form processing
Mathematical expression recognition
Forensic document analysis
Historical document analysis
Multilingual document analysis
Multimedia document analysis
Pen-based input and its analysis
NLP for document analysis
Human document interaction
Authoring, annotation, and presentation systems
Performance evaluation
Applications

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: Jan. 2022
Notification: March 2022
Camera ready: April, 2022
Conference: May. 22-25, 2022

GENERAL CHAIR

Jean-Marc Ogier, La Rochelle, France

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

Jean-Christophe Burie, La Rochelle, France
Mickaël Coustaty, L3i, La Rochelle, France
Antoine Doucet, L3i, la Rochelle, France


8) Call for Papers: 26th International Conference on Pattern
Recognition (ICPR 2022)

August 21-25, 2022
Montreal, Canada
Website: https://www.icpr2022.com
PDF version of this call: https://www.icpr2022.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-07-14-ICPR-2022-Call-for-papers-2.pdf

ICPR 2022 is the premier world conference in Pattern Recognition. It covers both theoretical issues and applications of the discipline. We solicit original research for publication in the main conference. Topics of interest include all aspects of Pattern Recognition.

Important Dates

Jan 10 Paper registration deadline
Jan 17 Paper submission deadline
Mar 14 Acceptance/Rejection/Revision decision
Apr 11 Revision/rebuttal deadline
May 09 Final decision on submissions
Jun 06 Camera ready manuscript deadline
Jun 06 Early bird registration deadline

ICPR 2022 will employ a two-round review process. Papers must be registered prior to submission and all submissions take place through the PaperCept Conference Management Submission.

Papers submitted by the paper deadline will be reviewed using single-blind peer review. Authors are required to include their names and affiliations in their paper as illustrated in the sample paper templates. Submissions must identify the preferred track among the six conference tracks.

The result of the first review round will either be accept (possibly with recommended changes), reject, or revise to resubmit for a second review round. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE and be available in IEEE Xplore. Submissions must be limited to six pages plus additional pages for references.

IAPR Ethical Requirements for Authors

IAPR requires that all authors wishing to present a paper declare that:

  • The paper is substantially original and that no paper substantially similar in content has been submitted or will be submitted to any other conference or journal during the review period.
  • The paper does not contain any plagiarism.
  • The paper will be presented by the author or a co-author in person or online.
  • IAPR retains the right to eliminate any papers in violation of these requirements and to exclude the authors of such papers from future IAPR community activities.

For the full statement of IAPR ethical requirements for authors, see the
webpage https://iapr.org/constitution/soe.php.

More info: https://www.icpr2022.com


9) IJDAR article alert (vol. 24)

Volume 24, Issue 1-2, June 2021
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/24-1

Titles of the 10 articles:

  • Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding and beyond. 1-2
  • Arrow R-CNN for handwritten diagram recognition. 3-17
  • Knowledge-driven description synthesis for floor plan interpretation. 19-32
  • Cross-modal photo-caricature face recognition based on dynamic multi-task learning. 33-48
  • CNN-based segmentation of speech balloons and narrative text boxes from comic book page images. 49-62
  • Translating math formula images to LaTeX sequences using deep neural networks with sequence-level training. 63-75
  • Combination of deep neural networks and logical rules for record segmentation in historical handwritten registers using few examples. 77-96
  • Offline script recognition from handwritten and printed multilingual documents: a survey. 97-121
  • Text recognition for Vietnamese identity card based on deep features network. 123-131
  • Persian handwritten digit, character and word recognition using deep learning. 133-143

10) Job offers (1 new)

Research Engineer/PostDoc Position (2.5 Years) – IRISA/INSA Rennes (France)

Title: Optical Music Recognition System for Historical Orchestra Scores

Pdf version

https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/en/english-optical-music-recognition-system-for-historical-orchestra-scores/https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/files/2021/07/SujetInge_Collabscore.pdf

Important Dates

October 1, 2021 - May 31, 2024  Contract period

IRISA – Intuidoc

IRISA is a joint research center for Informatics, including Robotics and Image and Signal Processing. 850 people, 40 teams, explore the world of digital sciences to find applications in healthcare, ecology-environment, cyber-security, transportation, multimedia, and industry. INSA Rennes is one of the 8 trustees of IRISA.

The Intuidoc team (https://www.irisa.fr/intuidoc) conducts research on the topic of document image recognition. Since many years, the team proposes a system, called DMOS-PI method, for document structure analysis of documents. This DMOS-PI method is used for document recognition, or field extraction in archive documents, handwritten contents damaged documents (musical scores, archives, newspapers, letters, electronic schema, etc.).

Collabscore project
Collabscore is a project founded by ANR (French Research National Agency), led by the CNAM. The goal is to study ancient scores provided by the BNF (Bibliothèque National de France) and Royaumont foundation. Collabscore is a multidisciplinary project. The first task consists in improving OMR (Optical Music Recognition) results using learning techniques. The second action will focus on methods for automatic alignment of the scored score with other multimodal sources. The last one will set up demonstrators based on notated scores at two of the project partners, representative, in various ways, of institutions in charge of musical heritage collections (BnF and Fondation Royaumont). Intuidoc team focuses on the first task of musical score recognition.

Position to be filled

  • Position: Post-doctoral fellow / Research Engineer
  • Time commitment: Full-time
  • Duration of the contract: up to 32 months, starting as soon a possible
  • Supervisors: Bertrand Coüasnon, Aurélie Lemaitre, Yann Soullard
  • Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits
  • Location: IRISA — Rennes, France

Missions

The post-doctoral/engineer fellow will work on the conception of a OMR system. Based on previous works of our research team, the goal of this position is to enrich an existing system (DMOS-PI) to get a complete OMR system for historical orchestra scores. The tasks are mainly:

  • define a grammatical description of musical notation, using the existing DMOS-PI method;
  • generate unsupervised data for training musical symbols recognizers;
  • create a gradual mechanism for adapting the system to new partitions;
  • integrate anomaly detection into the system.

Logical programming from grammars and languages is expected in this work. Machine Learning methods, especially Deep learning-based approaches, will be used to solve some of the tasks, as done in our previous works on music symbol detection.

Applicant Requirements

  • PhD, Master degree or Engineering degree in computer science
  • Experience in document recognition or statistical analysis.
  • Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have, as well as knowledge of music notation.
  • Knowledge in deep learning with an experience with at least one library dedicated to deep learning (Keras, Tensorflow, Pytorch) are expected.

Candidates should contact via email: Bertrand Coüasnon (bertrand.couasnon@irisa.fr), Aurélie Lemaitre (aurelie.lemaitre@irisa.fr) and Yann Soullard (yann.soullard@irisa.fr).


Post-doctoral research position – L3i – La Rochelle, France

Title : Extraction of graphic elements in comics books for emotion recognition

The L3i laboratory has one open post-doc position in computer science, in the specific field of document image analysis and pattern recognition

Duration: 12 months (an extension of 12 months will be possible)
Position available from: As soon as possible, 2021
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, University of La Rochelle, France
Specialty: Computer Science/ Image Processing/ Document Analysis/ Pattern Recognition
Contact: Jean-Christophe BURIE (jcburie [at] univ-lr.fr)

Position Description

The L3i is a research lab of the University of La Rochelle. La Rochelle is a city in the south west of France on the Atlantic coast and is one of the most attractive and dynamic cities in France. The L3i works since several years on document analysis and has developed a well-known expertise in ‘Bande dessinée”, manga and comics analysis, indexing and understanding.

The work done by the post-doc will take part in the context of SAiL (Sequential Art Image Laboratory) a joint laboratory involving L3i and a private company. The objective is to create innovative tools to index and interact with digitised comics. The work will be done in a team of 10 researchers and engineers.

The work will consist in developing original approaches for extracting and recognizing graphics elements in comic panels in order to recognize emotions. Authors usually used different strategies for representing emotions such as shape of speech balloon, specific symbols, colour of the faces, etc. These elements are drawn among the other graphic elements (main characters, scenery, …) making the localisation and the extraction challenging. In order to extract these specific elements, the development of original approaches will be necessary. Deep learning-based strategies can be explored to reach this goal. This work will be done in collaboration with other researchers working on text understanding.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a completed PhD and a research experience in image processing and analysis, pattern recognition. Some knowledge and experience in deep learning are also recommended.

General Qualifications

• Good programming skills mastering at least one programming language like Python, Java, C/C++
• Good teamwork skills
• Good writing skills and proficiency in written and spoken English or French

Applications

Candidates should send a CV and a motivation letter to jcburie [at] univ-lr.fr.

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[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 146 – June 2021

Welcome to the June 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find Annual ICDAR voting results, latest IJDAR issue, the invitation to the summer school on Document Analysis, ICDAR call for nomination awards (extended) and related workshop information. Also, please check ICDAR news page for updates, and useful links.

Take care,

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

  • Deadlines:
    • June 21, award nomination deadline ICDAR 2021 (extended)
    • June 30, paper submission deadline ACPR 2021 (extended)
  • Events:
    • August 23-25, summer school SSDA 2021, Luleå, Sweden
    • September 5, workshop GREC 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 6, workshop CBDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 6, workshop HDI 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 5-10, conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • November 9-12, conference ACPR 2021, Jedu Island, Korea

2022 and later

  • Events:
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) Annual ICDAR voting results

The voting has now finished, there were 136 votes, with 101 (74%) in favor of organizing ICDAR annually. Thank you all for the participation and feel free to have a look at the response details, ongoing discussions on Kialo platform and DAR strategy website. We invite you to attend to the 3rd Future of Document Analysis and Recognition Workshop.
It will be held on Sunday 6th 2021. We will consider the results of this voting and continue the discussion of the future directions of our community.


3) IJDAR article alert

Volume 24, Issue 1-2, June 2021
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/24-1


4) Summer School on Document Analysis (4th edition, SSDA)

Digital Transformation in a Changing World

The objective of the school is to provide the participants with different aspects related to digital transformation of documents and beyond.  All the latest research being carried out in the field of document understanding, document (image) analysis, natural scene text detection and recognition, historical document analysis, Corona and Virtualization, and new topics will be covered in the school.

The summer school will provide a great opportunity to participants to expand their knowledge and skills by linking the theory with the real implementation. Speakers from different areas of expertise will be invited to enrich the overall impact of the school. By the end of the school participants will have advanced knowledge and application experience in:

  • Applied AI in document analysis
  • Document analysis for business applications
  • Natural scene text detection
  • Complex document understanding
  • Historical document processing
  • Current challenges in the field of document analysis
  • Contribution of major stakeholders in this field
  • Corona and Virtualization.

A very unique aspect of this summer school will be the novel hybridization concept, allowing participants from all areas (depending on the current Corona restrictions) to participate either virtually, or physically; with our long-standing experience in distance education and conferences in Luleå and the northern region following pedagogical principals of effective teaching and learning. LTU is the perfect host for the summer school 2021 (during the demanding aspects of the currently changing world).

Contact: ssda2021@ltu.se
Website: https://www.ltu.se/research/subjects/Maskininlarning/SSDA-2021?l=en


5) ICDAR 2021 Call for Nomination Awards (extended)

Nominations Due: April 30, June 21 2021

The IAPR/ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas:

  • Research
  • Training of students
  • Research/Industry interaction
  • Service to the community

Every two years, two awards categories are presented. Namely, the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made), and the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award. Each award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievements award will be invited to give the opening keynote speech at the ICDAR 2021 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference.

Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2021 Awards in both categories. The nomination pack should include the following:

  1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
  2. Supporting letters (1 page each) from 3 active researchers from at least 3 different countries.

A nomination is usually put forward by a researcher (preferably from a different institution than the nominee) who is knowledgeable of the scientific achievements of the nominee, and who organizes letters of support.

The submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed.

Please send nomination packs electronically to the TC10 and TC11 chairs:
Jean-Christophe BURIE, TC10 Chair (jcburie[at]univ-lr.fr)
Faisal SHAFAIT, TC11 Chair (faisal.shafait[at]seecs.edu.pk)


6) ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Human-Document Interaction (3rd edition)

September 06, 2021
Lausanne (Switzerland)
https://grce.labri.fr/HDI/

Following the positive feedback and the large audience of the first two editions of the HDI workshop in Kyoto (Japan) 2017 and Sydney (Australia) 2019, the Third Int. Workshop on Human-Document Interaction (HDI 2021) will focus on how humans interact with written information around them, and the interfaces between users and documents. The term document is meant here in the wider possible sense, to refer to any physical object that carries static or dynamic written information. The workshop aims to create a space for debate between the Document Image Analysis and Recognition and the Human-Computer Interaction communities. We consider that initiating this dialogue is relevant and timely.

Topics of Interest
●    Augmented documents
●    Linking physical and digital content
●    Reading behaviour analysis
●    Human factors
●    User experience and usability
●    Wearable sensors in reading
●    Active learning
●    Real time document image analysis algorithms
●    Content personalisation
●    Anytime document analysis algorithms
●    Applications (e.g. document editing, interactive translation, collaborative editing)

Key dates
Submission deadline:     May, 31
Notification:                     June, 21
Camera Ready:                July, 5
Workshop:                       November, 21

Scope and Motivation
Visual  processing  and  association  is  an  important  capacity  in  human    communication    and    intellectual    behavior.    Visual    information addresses patterns of understanding as well as spatial assemblies.   This   also   holds   for   office   environments   where   specialists are seeking for best possible information assistance for improved  processes  and  decision  making.
In the mean time, physical and digital documents are settling to coexist in peace – connecting the two is empowering for both sides. Technology advances, such as in augmented reality, permit bringing forms of digital interaction to the physical world and vice versa, while the linking between the physical and the digital world is done in an increasingly more fluid and realistic manner.
A new generation of readers, conditioned by the affordances offered by electronic content and the new media types (e.g. blogs and social media posts), have developed distinct reading behaviours and new ways to interact with written content. Wearable sensors allow observing the user and introducing the user context it in the loop, offering personalised services by intelligently linking written information with the user actions. Internet of things is evolving the way everyday objects (many of them carriers of text) can influence our actions.


7) ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR, 9th edition)

September 06, in conjunction with ICDAR 2021
Lausanne (Switzerland)
https://cbdar2021.univ-lr.fr

The aim of the CBDAR workshop is to provide a natural link between document image analysis and the wider computer vision community by attracting cutting edge research on the topic of Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition.

Topics of Interest

  • Camera based acquisition of written information • Restoration of camera captured documents (dewarping, deblurring, etc.)
• Camera-based document analysis and recognition
• Document image quality assessment / estimation
• Image degradation models for camera captured characters/documents
• Text extraction from scene images
• Text in video
• Document image retrieval
• Device constrained techniques and algorithms
• Performance evaluation and metrics
• Mobile OCR
• Smartphone-based document scanning applications
• Feature extraction in camera capture situations

Important dates

• Submission Deadline (normal paper) : 23 May (hard deadline)
• Submission Deadline (ICDAR re-submission): 23 May (hard deadline)
• Acceptance Notification: 21 June 2021
• Camera Ready Version: 05 July 2021
• CBDAR 2021 Workshop: Mon, 06 September 2021 

Submission Information & Publication of Proceedings

Workshop proceedings with accepted papers will be published by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (as is the case for the main conference ICDAR 2021).

Find more info please visit the workshop website and follow the twitter handle of the CBDAR workshop @cbdar_workshop: 
https://cbdar2021.univ-lr.fr


8) 14th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC) (repost)

September 05-06, 2021
Lausanne, Switzerland
http://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/

GREC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics Recognition is a sub-field of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, comics, musical scores, sketches, maps, architectural plans, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc.

The aim of this workshop is to maintain a very high level of interaction and creative discussions between participants, maintaining a “workshop” spirit, and not being tempted by a “mini-conference” model.

The workshop will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics related to graphics in document analysis and graphic recognition. For each session, there will be an invited presentation describing the state of the art and stating the open questions for the session’s topic, followed by a number of short presentations that will contribute by proposing solutions to some of the questions or presenting results of the speaker’s work. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion.

Topics

  • Analysis and interpretation of graphical documents, such as: Engineering drawings, floor-plans, mathematical expressions, comics, maps, music scores, patents, diagrams, charts, tables, etc.
  • Recognition of graphic elements, such as symbols, logos, stamps, drop-caps, drawings, etc.
  • Identification and localization of graphical mark-ups and annotations in written documents.
  • Raster-to-vector techniques.
  • Graphics-based information retrieval.
  • Historical graphics recognition and indexing.
  • Forensics (Writer identification/verification) in graphic documents.
  • Description of complete systems for interpretation of graphic documents.
  • Datasets and performance evaluation in graphics recognition.
  • Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for graphics multimedia documents.
  • 3-D models from multiple 2-D views (line drawings).
  • Digital ink processing.
  • Sketch recognition and understanding.
  • Camera-based graphics recognition.
  • Graphics recognition in born digital documents.
  • Analysis of graphics on new digital interfaces.
  • Graphics detection and recognition in real scenes.
  • Graphics analysis in medical images

Important dates

  • Submission deadline :
    • Abstract submission : May 10th, 2021 (hard deadline)
    • Full paper submission : May 17th, 202111:59PM Pacific Time Zone (hard deadline)
  • Acceptance notification: June 20th, 2021
  • Camera ready due: June 30th, 2021
  • Workshop : September. 05th – 06th, 2021

Accepted papers (full and short papers) will be published in a Springer LNCS volume dedicated to all ICDAR workshops. More information at: http://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/

General Chair : Jean-Christophe Burie
Program Co-Chair : Richard Zanibbi, Motoi Iwata and Pau Riba


9) International conference “Fantastic Futures” 2021 (3rd edition, FF 2021)

December 9-10, 2021
Paris, France
http://ai4lam.org

The ai4lam community is organizing its 3rd international conference “Les futurs fantastiques”, to be held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris on December 9 & 10, 2021. This conference will be in hybrid format online/onsite.

The program committee is looking for papers, tutorials or workshops proposals on the topic of artificial intelligence applied to libraries, archives and museums.

Please check our Call For Papers: https://easychair.org/cfp/FantasticFutures21 

We warmly invite you to submit your proposals, in the form of abstracts of 500 words maximum, on the Easychair platform by June 15, 2021 as instructed in the CFP. Proposals are accepted in both languages of the conference, English and French.

We will pay special attention to every submission in order to consider their integration in the conference program. 

For the Futurs Fantastiques 2021 program committee,

Emmanuelle Bermes, PC chair

FF21 CFP: https://easychair.org/cfp/FantasticFutures21  

More on ai4lam: http://ai4lam.org

Previous Conferences:
2019 : https://library.stanford.edu/projects/fantastic-futures
2018 : https://www.nb.no/artikler/fantastic-futures/


10) Job offers (1 new)

Post-doctoral research position – L3i – La Rochelle, France

Title : Extraction of graphic elements in comics books for emotion recognition

The L3i laboratory has one open post-doc position in computer science, in the specific field of document image analysis and pattern recognition

Duration: 12 months (an extension of 12 months will be possible)
Position available from: As soon as possible, 2021
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, University of La Rochelle, France
Specialty: Computer Science/ Image Processing/ Document Analysis/ Pattern Recognition
Contact: Jean-Christophe BURIE (jcburie [at] univ-lr.fr)

Position Description

The L3i is a research lab of the University of La Rochelle. La Rochelle is a city in the south west of France on the Atlantic coast and is one of the most attractive and dynamic cities in France. The L3i works since several years on document analysis and has developed a well-known expertise in ‘Bande dessinée”, manga and comics analysis, indexing and understanding.

The work done by the post-doc will take part in the context of SAiL (Sequential Art Image Laboratory) a joint laboratory involving L3i and a private company. The objective is to create innovative tools to index and interact with digitised comics. The work will be done in a team of 10 researchers and engineers.

The work will consist in developing original approaches for extracting and recognizing graphics elements in comic panels in order to recognize emotions. Authors usually used different strategies for representing emotions such as shape of speech balloon, specific symbols, colour of the faces, etc. These elements are drawn among the other graphic elements (main characters, scenery, …) making the localisation and the extraction challenging. In order to extract these specific elements, the development of original approaches will be necessary. Deep learning-based strategies can be explored to reach this goal. This work will be done in collaboration with other researchers working on text understanding.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a completed PhD and a research experience in image processing and analysis, pattern recognition. Some knowledge and experience in deep learning are also recommended.

General Qualifications

• Good programming skills mastering at least one programming language like Python, Java, C/C++
• Good teamwork skills
• Good writing skills and proficiency in written and spoken English or French

Applications

Candidates should send a CV and a motivation letter to jcburie [at] univ-lr.fr.

Download PDF

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 145 – April 2021

Welcome to the April 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find a message from the new TC10 Executive Committee. Then an information about a consultation of the community for an Annual ICDAR. It will be followed by the announcement of GREC 2021 workshop, the ICDAR Nomination Awards and ICDAR 2021 Doctoral Consortium.

Please take care and keep safe.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Message from the TC10 Executive Committee

Dear TC10 members,

Traditionally, the TC10 leadership change after ICPR. During this winter, Jean-Christophe Burie has been appointed as the successor to Alicia Fornés. First of all, the TC10 Executive Committee would like to thank Alicia on behalf of the whole TC10 community, for the invaluable work done during her chairmanship the last two years and half. We would also like to thank Partha Pratim Roy for his service during these last years.

The new Executive Committee will be composed of:

– Chair: Jean-Christophe Burie, L3i, University of la Rochelle, FRANCE.
– Vice chair: Miki Ueno, Osaka Institute of Technology, JAPAN.
– Educational officer: K.C. Santosh, University of South Dakota, USA.
– Dataset curator: Pau Riba, Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, SPAIN.
– Communication officer: Christophe Rigaud, L3i, University of La Rochelle, FRANCE.
– Webmaster: Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, L3i, University of la Rochelle, FRANCE.

Best regards,
The TC10 Executive Committee


2) Voting for Annual ICDAR

Over the past two years we have held numerous discussions about the evolution of our community. During 2020, with the help of a Task Force comprising a representative crosscut of members of our community, we identified key actions and defined a strategic plan for the document analysis and recognition community. Detailed information of the activity , including ways to participate, is available at the website: https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy

We will keep working on this strategic plan over the next term and start implementing actions. However the opinion of our community is essential to take the right direction.

One of the key proposals of the Task Force is to ensure that there is a yearly opportunity to publish in a top quality forum, by holding our flagship CORE-A conference, ICDAR, every year, with a consistent calendar. This would be complemented with actions to increase scientific quality, increase participation, and strengthen industry-academia links among others, as described in the strategic plan.

Although in principle this is an action affecting only ICDAR, it is expected that it will have repercussions to the other events of TC10/TC11, therefore a holistic analysis is required, and we have already held numerous discussions both on the idea of an annual ICDAR, and on the possible ways it might affect DAS, ICFHR and GREC. You can see the discussions (and still contribute if you think anything is missing) here:
https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy/discussions?authuser=0

We consider that this is now a mature topic, on which we have reflected a lot, and we need to choose a direction that will affect the planning of calls for bids for the next few years. The first decision should be on whether we want an annual, high-quality, ICDAR conference.

As you have subscribed to the TC10 newsletter, you have received a dedicated message inviting you to give you opinion and vote.

Jean-Christophe Burie, Alicia Forèz, TC10 Chair and past Chair
Faisal Shafait, Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC11 Chair and past Chair


3) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

  • Deadlines:
    • May 10, abstract submission deadline GREC 2021
    • May 15, doctoral consortium submission deadline ICDAR 2021
    • May 17, full paper submission deadline GREC 2021
  • Events:
    • September 5-6, workshop GREC 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • September 5-10, conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • November 9-12, conference ACPR 2021, Jedu Island, Korea

2022 and later

  • Events:
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

4) 14th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC)

September 05-06, 2021
Lausanne, Switzerland
http://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/

GREC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics Recognition is a sub-field of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, comics, musical scores, sketches, maps, architectural plans, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc.

The aim of this workshop is to maintain a very high level of interaction and creative discussions between participants, maintaining a “workshop” spirit, and not being tempted by a “mini-conference” model.

GREC 2021 will continue the tradition of past workshops held at the Penn State University (USA), Nancy (France), Jaipur (India), Kingston (Canada), Barcelona (Spain),, Hong Kong (China), Curitiba (Brazil), La Rochelle (France), Seoul (Corea), Lehigh (USA), Nancy (France), Kyoto (Japan) and Sydney (Australia).

The workshop will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics related to graphics in document analysis and graphic recognition. For each session, there will be an invited presentation describing the state of the art and stating the open questions for the session’s topic, followed by a number of short presentations that will contribute by proposing solutions to some of the questions or presenting results of the speaker’s work. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion.

We encourage the authors to submit papers on the topics detailed below.

Topics

  • Analysis and interpretation of graphical documents, such as: Engineering drawings, floor-plans, mathematical expressions, comics, maps, music scores, patents, diagrams, charts, tables, etc.
  • Recognition of graphic elements, such as symbols, logos, stamps, drop-caps, drawings, etc.
  • Identification and localization of graphical mark-ups and annotations in written documents.
  • Raster-to-vector techniques.
  • Graphics-based information retrieval.
  • Historical graphics recognition and indexing.
  • Forensics (Writer identification/verification) in graphic documents.
  • Description of complete systems for interpretation of graphic documents.
  • Datasets and performance evaluation in graphics recognition.
  • Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for graphics multimedia documents.
  • 3-D models from multiple 2-D views (line drawings).
  • Digital ink processing.
  • Sketch recognition and understanding.
  • Camera-based graphics recognition.
  • Graphics recognition in born digital documents.
  • Analysis of graphics on new digital interfaces.
  • Graphics detection and recognition in real scenes.
  • Graphics analysis in medical images

Guidelines for authors

For this edition, authors are invited to submit two types of paper :

  • Full papers describing complete works of research (12-15 pages). They will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 2 reviews considering the originality of work.
  • Short papers providing an opportunity to report on research in progress and to present novel positions on graphic recognition (up to 6 pages).

Accepted papers (full and short papers) will be published in a Springer LNCS volume dedicated to all ICDAR workshops.

The submitted papers will respect the same policy and conditions of ICDAR 2021 conference papers. Papers should be formatted according to the instructions and style files provided by Springer. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded here. It is also available on Overleaf.

You can also see the author instructions on ICDAR Website for the format or downloand the LNCS Guidelines for authors.

Important dates

  • Submission deadline :
    • Abstract submission : May 10th, 2021 (hard deadline)
    • Full paper submission : May 17th, 202111:59PM Pacific Time Zone (hard deadline)
  • Acceptance notification: June 20th, 2021
  • Camera ready due: June 30th, 2021
  • Workshop : September. 05th – 06th, 2021

More information at: http://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/

General Chair : Jean-Christophe Burie
Program Co-Chair : Richard Zanibbi, Motoi Iwata and Pau Riba


5) ICDAR 2021 Call for Nomination Awards

Nominations Due: April 30, 2021

The IAPR/ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas:

  • Research
  • Training of students
  • Research/Industry interaction
  • Service to the community

Every two years, two awards categories are presented. Namely, theIAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made), and the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award. Each award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievements award will be invited to give the opening keynote speech at the ICDAR 2021 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference.

Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2021 Awards in both categories. The nomination pack should include the following:

  1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
  2. Supporting letters (1 page each) from 3 active researchers from at least 3 different countries.

A nomination is usually put forward by a researcher (preferably from a different institution than the nominee) who is knowledgeable of the scientific achievements of the nominee, and who organizes letters of support.

The submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed.

Please send nomination packs electronically to the TC10 and TC11 chairs:
Dr Faisal SHAFAIT, TC11 Chair (faisal.shafait[at]seecs.edu.pk)
Dr Jean-Christophe BURIE, TC10 Chair (jcburie[at]univ-lr.fr)

The deadline for receiving nominations is April 30, 2021 but early submissions are strongly encouraged.


6) ICDAR 2021 call for Doctoral Consortium

In 2011, the first Doctoral Consortium in the Document Analysis community was organized in conjunction with the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). This has led to successful successor events at ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015, ICDAR 2017 and ICDAR 2019. The tradition of having a Doctoral Consortium as a satellite event to the ICDAR main conference will further be continued at ICDAR 2021 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The goal of the ICDAR 2021 Doctoral Consortium is to create an opportunity for Ph.D. students to test their research ideas, present their current progress and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and insights related to their future work and career perspectives. A mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback. In addition, students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during a special poster session.

Participation in the ICDAR 2021 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application by May 15th, 2021. The Doctoral Consortium Chairs will then review all applications received. Preference will be given to students who are at a stage in their studies most likely to benefit (i.e., they have identified a research direction and published some initial results, but the thesis is not yet set in stone).

Participation to the Doctoral Consortium will be free for all accepted students, i.e., there will be no extra registration fees!

The ICDAR 2021 Doctoral Consortium will take place the day before the main conference, i.e., on Wednesday, September 07.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Students willing to participate should submit a participation package in a SINGLE pdf file. The submission package should be prepared using the LaTeX or MS Word templates (see ICDAR DC webpage at https://icdar2021.org/calls/doctoral-consortium/ ) and should contain the following information:

  • Student’s name
  • University
  • Title of your thesis
  • Supervisor of the thesis
  • Starting and expected finalization date of the PhD.
  • short research plan (1-2 pages about the work).
  • short CV (1-2 pages).

The research plan should contain an overview of the PhD topic, the steps made so far (including a list of publications), and the actions planned before finishing the PhD, especially novel research ideas to be pursued.

Submission should be done before May 15th, 2021 to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcicdar2021

IMPORTANT DATES:

  • Submission deadline: May 15th, 2021
  • Acceptance notification and Mentor assignment: May 25th, 2021
  • Mentoring period : from May 26th to July 31st, 2021
  • Final material due: August 1st, 2021
  • Doctoral Consortium: September 7th, 2021

We are looking forward to your participation!

Nibal Nayef and Jean-Christophe Burie
Doctoral Consortium Chairs


7) Open call for expressions of interest for organizing future TC10 or TC11 events (repost)

Due to the current pandemic situation, and understanding the difficulties in putting together a complete bid under the current circumstances, the TC10 and TC11 teams have opted not to open specific calls for organizing any future events planned for after 2023.

Nevertheless, we would like to probe the community, and invite our colleagues to start thinking about whether they would like to potentially organize a future TC10 or TC11 event (e.g. conference, workshop, summer school).

We will be gathering expressions of interest for a few months. These are not meant to be full proposals, but rather an informal message to the TC10/TC11 chair, indicating a possible interest to organize one of the future events.

If you think you can take on the organization of such a future event, please send us a quick message, indicating if possible where, when and which event you would be interested in organizing.

Dr Faisal Shafait, TC11 Chair (faisal.shafait[at]seecs.edu.pk)
Dr Jean-Christophe Burie, TC10 Chair (jcburie[at]univ-lr.fr)


[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 144 – December 2020

Welcome to the December edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find an important message from TC10 chair and fresh information about ICDAR 2021 conference, tutorials and competitions. Also, call for proposals to organize the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis and DAS 2022.

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19 and I wish you a happy new year!

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Message from TC10 chair:

Dear all,

First of all, let me wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Let’s hope 2021 will be much better. Indeed, this “pandemic 2020” has been very difficult at many levels, taking care of our beloved ones and adapting ourselves to new ways of doing research, teaching, meeting friends, relatives…

On the positive side, we can be proud since we have shown a great adaptability degree, and many 100% online conferences/workshops, including DAS and ICFHR, have been really successful and participative.

As you may remember, at the “2nd Future of Document Analysis and Recognition Workshop” (at ICDAR 2019) many of us discussed the future of our community. During 2020, we set a Task Force to continue the discussions towards the definition of a strategic plan for the document analysis and recognition community. We involved the TC10/TC11 chairs/vice-chairs and some of the previous/future organizers of our events (conferences, workshops, summer schools). The update of this activity was presented at DAS and ICFHR. You can find the session that was recorded at DAS here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_46pgNwj0IQ&feature=youtu.be

Our plan is to keep working in this direction during 2021, and of course, receive feedback from all the community. Please, stay tuned!

All the best and take care,
Alicia Fornés (TC10 chair)


Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

  • Deadlines:
    • January 11, tutorial proposal ICDAR 2021 (extended)
    • January 31, proposal submission SSDA 2021
    • February 8, paper submission deadline for ICDAR 2021
  • Events:
    • January 10-15, conference ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy (online)
    • January 21-22, workshop S+SSPR 2020, Padua, Italy (online)
    • February 4-6, conference ICPRAM 2021 (online)
    • September 5-10, conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland

2022 and later

  • Events:
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) IJDAR article alert

Volume 23, Issue 4, December 2020
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/23-4


3) Invitation to TC10/11 meeting at ICPR

You are all invited to attend the next TC10/11 meeting that will take place online on Wednesday, January 20, 12:00 – 13:00 CET. The meeting is open to all TC10 members receiving this newsletter.

The link for connecting to the online meeting will be shared in January.

Note that it is habitual to host a joint TC10/11 meeting during the ICPR. Since ICPR will take place as a virtual conference this year, we have decided to decouple the TC10/11 meeting from the conference and hold it separately the week after ICPR as a virtual meeting. This way the TC10/11 meeting will not be bound to the timing of ICPR coffee breaks, while it will be open to everyone.


4) Open call for expressions of interest for organizing future TC10 or TC11 events

Due to the current pandemic situation, and understanding the difficulties in putting together a complete bid under the current circumstances, the TC10 and TC11 teams have opted not to open specific calls for organizing any future events planned for after 2023.

Nevertheless, we would like to probe the community, and invite our colleagues to start thinking about whether they would like to potentially organize a future TC10 or TC11 event (e.g. conference, workshop, summer school).

We will be gathering expressions of interest for a few months. These are not meant to be full proposals, but rather an informal message to the TC10/TC11 chair, indicating a possible interest to organize one of the future events.

If you think you can take on the organization of such a future event, please send us a quick message, indicating if possible where, when and which event you would be interested in organizing.

Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC11 Chair (dimos[at]cvc.uab.es)
Dr Alicia Fornes, TC10 Chair (afornes[at]cvc.uab.es)


5) ICDAR 2021 2nd call for paper

The 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
September 5-10, 2021 – Lausanne, Switzerland

Web page: https://icdar2021.org
Call for Papers (PDF): ICDAR2021-2nd-CfP.pdf
Contact: info@icdar2021.org

ICDAR is the premier international event for scientists and practitioners involved with document analysis and recognition, a field of growing importance in the current age of digital transition. In 2021, the 16th edition of this flagship conference will be held in Switzerland for the first time.

The organizers are committed to holding a safe and secure ICDAR 2021 in the face of the worldwide COVID-19 health crisis. In the event it becomes necessary, ICDAR 2021 will be held with options for remote participation. All accepted papers will be presented at the conference and published in the ICDAR 2021 proceedings, whether or not the conference takes place physically, virtually, or in a hybrid format.

List of accepted workshops: https://icdar2021.org/workshops/

List of accepted competitions: https://icdar2021.org/competitions/

Call for papers:

Important Dates

  • 08 Feb 2021: Paper submission deadline
  • 26 Apr 2021: Notification of acceptance
  • 17 May 2021: Camera-ready version submission deadline
  • 05-07 Sep 2021: Workshops, tutorials, and doctoral consortium
  • 08-10 Sep 2021: Main conference dates

News: recent past ICDAR proceedings have been published using IEEE Computer Society Press. Building on successful collaborations between IAPR and Springer, the ICDAR advisory board has decided to publish the ICDAR 2021 proceedings under the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

More details at: https://icdar2021.org/calls/call-for-papers/

Andreas Fischer, Rolf Ingold, and Marcus Liwicki
ICDAR 2021 General Chairs
(info@icdar2021.org)


6) ICDAR 2021 call for tutorials (deadline extended)

The ICDAR 2021 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials that will be held on September 5-7, before the main conference begins.

Detailed information at:
https://icdar2021.org/calls/call-for-tutorials/

Important dates:

  • Jan 11, 2020: (extended) Proposal Due
  • Jan 31, 2020: (extended) Acceptance Notification
  • Sep 5-7, 2021: Dates of Tutorials

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Tutorial Chairs:

Veronique Eglin (veronique.eglin[at]insa-lyon.fr)
Alicia Fornés (afornes[at]cvc.uab.es)


7) ICDAR 2021 competition on Document Visual Question Answering

*** NEW DATASETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE ***

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the ICDAR 2021 Long-Term Competition on Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) that is organized in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 5-10 September 2021, Lausanne (Switzerland).

Website: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=17

Overview

Contemporary Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) research tends to focus on generic information extraction tasks (character recognition, table extraction, word spotting), largely disconnected from the final purpose the extracted information is used for. The DocVQA challenge seeks to inspire a “purpose-driven” point of view in Document Analysis and Recognition research, where the document content is extracted and used to respond to high-level tasks defined in natural language by the human consumers of this information. In this sense DocVQA constitutes a new problem space, where high-level semantic tasks dynamically drive information extraction algorithms to conditionally interpret document images.

DocVQA is modeled as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem where the task is to answer a natural language question asked on a single document image or a collection of digitized documents. This goes over and above passing a document image through OCR, and involves understanding all types of information conveyed by a document.

The DocVQA challenge is a continuous, evolving effort, linked to various scientific events. The ICDAR 2021 competition is the second edition of the challenge, while a first edition was organized in the context of CVPR 2020 Workshop on Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era.

Tasks

The challenge is structured around three tasks, out of which Task 2 and Task 3 constitute the core of the ICDAR 2021 edition:

Task 1: Single Document VQA. VQA over a generic set of ~40k questions over ~10k documents. Introduced for CVPR 2020, and continuously open for submissions.

Task 2: Document Collection VQA. VQA over a collection of ~14k forms. Locating the evidence is as important as finding the correct answer. Introduced for CVPR 2020 and revamped for ICDAR 2021.

Task 3: Infographics VQA. VQA over challenging documents with complex layout. New task introduced for ICDAR 2021 on a new dataset of ~5k documents

Registration

The competition is hosted at the Robust Reading Competition portal. Please register to the portal in order to gain access to downloads and submit results.

https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?com=contestant

Important Dates

10 November 2020: Release of training data subset for new Task 3 on “Infographics VQA”
10 December 2020: Release of full dataset for new Task 3 on “Infographics VQA”
31 March 2021: Deadline for Competition submissions
5 -10 September 2021: Results presentation at ICDAR

Organizers

Minesh Mathew (IIIT Hyderabad, India)
Rubèn P. Tito (Computer Vision Center, Spain)
C. V. Jawahar (IIIT Hyderabad, India)
Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Center, Spain)


8) ICDAR 2021 competition on Historical Map Segmentation

Dear colleagues,

We would like to encourage you to participate in the ICDAR 2021 Competition on Historical Map Segmentation, to be organized in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 5-10 September 2021, Lausanne (Switzerland).

This competition is organized by the LASTIG team of IGN (the French National Mapping Agency), the R&D Lab. of EPITA (French engineering school in computer science), and the Center of Historical Studies of EHESS (French graduate schools of social sciences).

Why should you consider this competition ?

  1. All datasets are released with an open license as soon as they are available (training and validation sets already available).
  2. Evaluation tools are released early with an open source license.
  3. Winners of each task will be invited to co-author the report paper.
  4. We propose unsolved research problems at the frontiers of computer sciences, social sciences and history, with an important potential impact in the geographic information systems (GIS) community.

Downloads, mailing list, updates, evaluations tools available here: https://icdar21-mapseg.github.io/

Twitter account: @ICDAR21_MapSeg

Contact address: icdar21-mapseg-contact(at)googlegroups.com

Tasks:

  • Task 1: detecting a set of closed shapes (building blocks) in the map image.
  • Task 2: segmenting the map content from the rest of the sheet.
  • Task 3: locating the intersection points of graticule lines (historical georeferencing lines).

Schedule:

  • Now: training and validation sets available – Training phase is started
  • March 31: Registration deadline for competition participants
  • April 5 to April 16: Test phase
  • April 23: Notification of results, Method description deadline
  • July 1: Full dataset release, Full results disclosure.

Best regards,

The organizers

Edwin Carlinet (LRDE/EPITA), Joseph Chazalon (LRDE/EPITA), Yizi Chen (LASTIG/IGN & LRDE/EPITA), Bertrand Duménieu (CRH/EHESS), Thierry Géraud (LRDE/EPITA), Clément Mallet (LASTIG/IGN), Julien Perret (LASTIG/IGN & CRH/EHESS)


9) SSDA 2021 call for proposals: IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis

Important Dates

January 31, 2021  Proposal Submission Deadline

Submit Proposals via email to:

Part of the mission of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) TC11 and TC10 is to promote high quality educational activities related to Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. Responding to this need, TC10 and TC11 have established a series of summer schools. After the successful organization of summer schools in Jaipur, India, La Rochelle, France, and Islamabad, Pakistan, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the fourth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2021.

The “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” is intended to become the primary educational activity of IAPR TC11 (Reading Systems) and TC10 (Graphics Recognition). The School is meant to be a training activity where participants are exposed to the latest trends and techniques of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition.

The aim of the School is to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in selected topics of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The School should aim to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and PhD students in the field.

Individuals and groups who are interested in Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting the 2021 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and most recently in the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School.

In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarize themselves with the guidelines for organizing the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site:
http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Guidelines_for_Organising_and_Bidding_to_Host_the_TC10_/_TC11_Summer_School

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures for organizing the School. Especially, this means that organizers will apply for IAPR support and that the event will use the series title “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” with an optional sub-title denoting a special focus of the respective event.

COVID-19 related notice:

We are offering an option to prospective organizers to prioritize a face-to-face event, but due to the unprecedented COVID-19 situation globally, we are also looking to solicit innovative on-line/virtual options as an alternative. Although a challenge, the current pandemic situation offers some new opportunities to engage and organize the Summer School differently – prospective organizers are encouraged to consider this point as part of their bid preparations.

Please consider submitting a proposal for this increasingly important event for the TC10/TC11 community. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact the TC11 and TC10 SSDA representatives: Michael Blumenstein (TC11 Representative) and KC Santosh (TC10 Representative).

Previous events:

As a reference, the 2019 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Islamabad, Pakistan with the theme Deep Learning Applications for Document Analysis (URL: http://pprs.org.pk/events/ssda2019.html)


10) DAS 2022 call for bids

Following the successful organization of the 14th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, hosted virtually from Wuhan (China) last July, we are now soliciting proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2022.

The DAS workshop has become one of the signature events for TC11. DAS 2022 will build on the tradition established by past DAS workshops held in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1994), Malvern, PA (1996), Nagano, Japan (1998), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2000), Princeton, NJ (2002), Florence, Italy (2004), Nelson, New Zealand (2006), Nara, Japan (2008), Boston, MA (2010), and Gold Coast, Australia (2012), Tours-Loire Valley, France (2014), Santorini, Greece (2016), Vienna, Austria (2018), and Wuhan, China (2020).

Individuals and groups who are interested in Document Analysis Systems are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2022. The event should preferably take place in late summer/fall but is not limited to this period.

The submission deadline is March 31st, 2021.

Proposals should be submitted to the TC11 chair (Dimosthenis Karatzas) and vice-chair (Gernot Fink).

If you have a potential interest in preparing a proposal, please let us know in advance. Such an expression of interest is not a commitment to make a formal proposal nor an official bid, but it would help us monitor the bid preparation activity and will give us a chance to help with the preparation of the bids.

Similarly, if you need further information concerning DAS, please feel free to contact us.

The final selection among competing proposals will be made short after the deadline by the DAS Steering Committee, which is composed of all those who have themselves organized or contributed substantially to past DAS workshops.

Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC11 Chair (dimos\@cvc.uab.es)
Dr Gernot Fink, TC11 Vice-Chair (gernot.fink\@cs.tu-dortmund.de)


11) Job offers (2 new)

PhD Position, Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (CS@RIT) FILLED

Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Start Date: Fall 2021

We are looking for a qualified candidate to fill a grant-funded PhD position in the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab at RIT starting in Fall 2021.  This position will be part of the recently created Molecule Maker Lab Institute ( MMLI) funded by the US government.

MMLI is led by a number of world-renown computer scientists and chemists seeking to accelerate chemical discovery (e.g., in service of creating improved materials for solar cells), along with related educational and outreach efforts intended to democratize the chemical discovery process. The project is centered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with participation from researchers at Penn State and RIT.

The focus of this PhD is the recognition/extraction, indexing, and search of chemical diagrams, multi-modal search (text + diagrams), and creating chemical knowledge graphs extracted from the chemical literature and other sources. The aim with this work is to advance the state-of-the-art for diagrammatic recognition and search, as the associated development of new AI-based techniques for chemical discovery. In this PhD role, the student will have be expected to collaborate effectively in an interdisciplinary team comprised of computer scientists, chemists, and engineers.

Questions about this position should be sent to the dprl lab director, Richard Zanibbi ( rxzvcs@rit.edu). Please share this with others that may be interested.


Post-doc position in Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Document image fraud detection FILLED


L3i laboratory at La Rochelle, France
Start date: February 1st, 2021 (may be modified according to the sanitary situation)
Duration: 12 months
Income: 2100 € / month

The work carried out by the candidate will be a part of the LabCom IDEAS. IDEAS is co-funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region, and brings together the Yooz company and the L3i laboratory. The objective is to imagine, invent, design, develop, optimize and train the best algorithms for processing automatically business documents. The goal is to offer services, based on artificial intelligence, that are capable of automatically analyzing and understanding various types of business documents.

The work of the postdoc fellow will fall within the area “Document fraud detection”. The aim is to develop new methods for fraud detection in document images (image forensics) without prior knowledge. The candidate, who holds a PhD. in the fields of computer science, computer engineering, signal processing, or applied mathematics, must have a significant research experience in the domain of image or signal processing and analysis.

Candidates for this position should send a CV and a cover letter (names and reference details would be appreciated) to:

–    petra.gomez [at] univ-lr.fr 
–    mickael.coustaty [at] univ-lr.fr
–    nicolas.sidere [at] univ-lr.fr
–    Vincent.PoulaindAndecy [at] getyooz.com 
–    Saddok.Kebairi [at] getyooz.com

More details available at: https://ao.univ-lr.fr/index.php/s/Kj2LATK2yxFFPkX

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 143 – October 2020

Welcome to the October edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find several upcoming deadlines including ICDAR2021 call for workshop (Oct. 5th) and MANPU@ICPR 2020 paper submission (extended to Oct. 10th).

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Call for contributions: feel free to contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

  • Deadlines:
    • October 5, workshop proposal submission deadline for ICDAR 2021
    • October 6, paper submission deadline for VISAPP 2021
    • October 6, paper submission deadline for ICPRAM 2021
    • October 10, paper submission deadline for MANPU 2020 (extended)
    • October 16, paper submission deadline for S+SSPR 2020
    • November 2, journal-track paper submission deadline for ICDAR 2021
  • Events:

2021 and later

  • January 10-15, 2021, conference ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy (online)
  • January 19-22, 2021, workshop S+SSPR 2020, Padua, Italy (online)
  • February 8, 2021: paper submission deadline for ICDAR 2021
  • February 4-6, 2021: conference ICPRAM 2021
  • September 5-10, 2021 conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • December, 2022 conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) IJDAR article alert

Volume 23, Issue 3, September 2020
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/23/3


3) ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track

Continuing a feature that was added in 2019, ICDAR 2021 will again include the option of a journal track that offers the rapid turnaround and dissemination times of a conference while providing the paper length, scientific rigor, and careful review process of an archival journal.

Important Dates

Nov  2   Journal track paper submission deadline
Jan 11   Initial journal track decision announced to authors
Mar 15   Revised journal track paper submission deadline
May 31   Final journal track paper decision announced to authors

The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions that present original work in the areas of Document Analysis and Recognition appropriate to both the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR). Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR and will receive an oral presentation slot at the ICDAR 2021 conference. Journal versions of previously published conference papers or survey papers will not be considered for this special issue. Such submissions can be submitted as journal-only papers via the regular IJDAR process.

Authors who submit their work to the journal track commit themselves to present their results at the ICDAR conference in case of acceptance. Springer-Nature, the publisher of IJDAR, will make the papers accepted for the journal track freely available in a time frame of four weeks around the conference, beyond being available in the archival journal.

Format

Papers submitted to the journal track should follow the format of IJDAR submissions and all of the standard guidelines.

Procedure and deadlines

While we are able to permit a somewhat “soft” deadline for submissions of papers to the IJDAR-ICDAR journal track, it must be understood by all authors that the full journal review process will be required for all such submissions – there is no “short cut.” Papers that are submitted later run the risk of the review process not completing in time. In such cases, authors should know that: (1) The submitted paper can still continue under review as an IJDAR paper. (2) The authors always have the option of preparing a shorter version of the paper to submit via the regular ICDAR process.

Questions regarding the status of a paper that is under review for the ICDAR-IJDAR journal track should be directed to the Journal Editorial Office by using the Editorial Manager tools. The guest editors have full authority to determine that the journal review process will not complete in time, and to decline submissions that arrive too late. In which case they will immediately notify the authors who can decide to leave the paper in the standard journal reviewing system or withdraw the manuscript from the journal.

Inquiries

For any information about this initiative, please email one of the editors of this special issue or consult the FAQ that will be posted on the IJDAR website.

Editors

This special issue is a joint initiative of the IJDAR editors and the ICDAR 2021 program chairs.
Josep Lladós, Daniel Lopresti, Seiichi Uchida – Program Chairs of ICDAR 2021
Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti, Simone Marinai – Editors-in-Chief of IJDAR

For more information, please visit: https://icdar2021.org/calls/call-for-journal/


4) ICDAR2021 call for workshop

The ICDAR 2021 Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops that will be held before the commencement of the ICDAR 2021 main conference. Researchers interested in organizing workshops at ICDAR 2021 are invited to submit a proposal, including the following information:

  1. Title
  2. Preference for the duration (full day or half day) and date (September 5-7, 2021)
  3. Scope and motivation
  4. Topics
  5. Relevance for ICDAR
  6. Potential committee
  7. Short CV of organizers

Notes

  • The ICDAR main conference organizers will handle the workshop registration and provide workshop space, coffee breaks and other facilities required to organize workshops (e.g. a room, a projector and a screen). In addition, a free registration will be provided to an organizer of each workshop.
  • If a workshop incurs costs for invited speakers, the workshop organizers are required to bear that cost. The workshop organizers may solicit sponsorship to cover the relevant costs. They may use their free registration for the invited speaker.
  • Please set the camera-ready due date of your workshop at July 5, 2021or prior.

Proceedings

  • Workshop proceedings will be published through the ICDAR organizers and proceeding costs will also be borne by the ICDAR main organizers.
  • The front matter (preface, title page and so on) and the paper order with session dividers are provided from the workshop organizers to the ICDAR2021 Publication Chairs. (Its due date will be set around the same date as camera-ready papers.)
  • If the proceedings related conditions above are not met by an organizer, the proceedings will not be published through the ICDAR main organizers, and the organizer will need to be published locally by their own.

Important Dates

  • October 5, 2020: Workshop proposal due date
  • November 2, 2020: Acceptance notification
  • September 5 – 7, 2021: Dates of workshops

For more information, please visit: https://icdar2021.org/calls/call-for-workshops/


5) MANPU@ICPR 2020 workshop

4th International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding
11 January 2021 – Milan, Italy
(in conjunction with ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy)

Comics is a medium constituted of images combined with text and other visual information in order to narrate a story. Nowadays, comic books are a widespread cultural expression all over the world. Moreover, from a researcher point of view, comics images are attractive targets because the structure of a comics page includes various elements (such as panels, speech balloons, captions, leading characters, and so on), the drawing of which depends on the style of the author and presents a large variability. Therefore comics image analysis is not a trivial problem and is still immature compared with other kinds of image analysis.

Scope and Topics

The scope of this workshop includes, but is not limited to,

  • Comics Image Processing
  • Comics Analysis and Understanding
  • Comics Recognition
  • Comics Retrieval and Spotting
  • Comics Enrichment
  • Born-digital comics
  • Reading Behavior Analysis of Comics
  • Comics Generation
  • Copy protection – Fraud detection
  • Physical/Digital Comics Interfaces
  • Cognitive Processing and Comprehension of Comics
  • Linguistics Analysis of Comics

Datasets

To evaluate the proposed works, participants will be able to use the following datasets that are publicly available. Researchers can request to download them at each website.

eBDtheque consists of 100 images with ground truth for panels, speech balloons, tails, text lines, leading characters.
Website: http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr

Manga109 consists of over 20 thousand images of 109 volumes (21,142 images).
Website: http://www.manga109.org

Important Dates

Paper submission due:  October 10, 2020 (extended)
Notification of acceptance:  November 3, 2020
Camera-ready paper due:  November 10, 2020
Workshop:  January 11, 2021

For more information, please visit: http://manpu2020.imlab.jp


[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 142 – June 2020

Welcome to the June edition of the TC10 newsletter.

I hope this message finds you and your loved ones well. In this issue, you will find the first ICDAR2021 call for paper and other major events postponed or moved online: DAS2020 will finally be fully virtual to be held July 27-29, 2020. ICPR2020 have been postponed to January 10-15, 2021.

This pandemic still affects the review process of the GREC-IJDAR special issue, author’s answer should be sent by mid-July.

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Call for Contributions: please contribute to TC10 newsletters, by sending any relevant news, event, notice, open position, dataset or link to us on iapr.tc10[at]gmail.com


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

  • Deadlines:
    • July 15, second round paper submission deadline for ICPR 2020
    • October 16 June 8, paper submission deadline for S+SSPR 2020
  • Events:
    • July 27-29, workshop DAS 2020, Wuhan, China (online)
    • August 23-28, conference ECCV 2020, Glasgow, UK (online)
    • September 7-10, conference ICFHR 2020, Dortmund, Germany (online)

2021 and later

  • January 10-15, 2021, conference ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy
  • January 19-22 September 8-11, 2021, workshop S+SSPR 2020, Padua, Italy (new dates)
  • February 8, 2021: paper submission deadline for ICDAR 2021
  • September 5-10, 2021 conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • December, 2022 conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) IJDAR article alert

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/23/2


3) ICDAR 2021 Call for paper

ICDAR 2021

The 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
September 5-10, 2021 – Lausanne, Switzerland

Web page: https://icdar2021.org
Call for Papers (PDF): ICDAR2021-1st-CfP.pdf
Call for Competitions (PDF): ICDAR2021-1st-CfC.pdf
Contact: info@icdar2021.org

Conference

ICDAR is the premier international event for scientists and practitioners involved with document analysis and recognition, a field of growing importance in the current age of digital transition. In 2021, the 16th edition of this flagship conference will be held in Switzerland for the first time.

The organizers are committed to holding a safe and secure ICDAR 2021 in the face of the current worldwide health crisis arising from COVID-19. In the event it becomes necessary, ICDAR 2021 will be held with options for remote “virtual” participation. All accepted papers will be published in the ICDAR 2021 proceedings, whether or not the conference takes place physically.

Important Dates

Main Conference

08 Feb 2021: Paper submission deadline
26 Apr 2021: Notification of acceptance
17 May 2021: Camera-ready version submission deadline
05-07 Sep 2021: Workshops, tutorials, and doctoral consortium
08-10 Sep 2021: Main conference dates

Special Journal Track

02 Nov 2020: Article submission deadline
11 Jan 2021: Initial decision announced to authors
15 Mar 2021: Revised version submission deadline
31 May 2021: Final decision announced to authors

Competitions

12 Jun 2020: Long-term competition proposal due
01 Jul 2020: Long-term competition acceptance notification
04 Sep 2020: Short-term competition proposal due
30 Sep 2020: Short-term competition acceptance notification
31 May 2021: Camera-ready papers due

Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:

  • Document image processing
  • Physical and logical layout analysis
  • Text and symbol recognition
  • Handwriting recognition
  • Document analysis systems
  • Document classification
  • Indexing and retrieval of documents
  • Document synthesis
  • Extracting document semantics
  • NLP for document understanding
  • Document summarization and translation
  • Office automation
  • Human document interaction
  • Multimedia document analysis
  • Mobile text recognition
  • Pen‐based document analysis
  • Scene text detection and recognition
  • Graphics recognition
  • Recognition of tables and formulas
  • Historical document analysis
  • Signature verification
  • Document forensics and provenance analysis
  • Medical document analysis
  • Document analysis for social good
  • Document analysis for literature search
  • Gold-standard benchmarks and data sets

Submission and Review

ICDAR 2021 will follow a double blind review process. Authors should not include their names and affiliations anywhere in the manuscript. Authors should also ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their previous work in the third person, and omit acknowledgements until the camera-ready version. Papers accepted for the conference will be allocated 6 pages in the proceedings, with the option of purchasing up to 2 extra pages.

Like in the previous ICDAR edition, we will have a special IJDAR journal track reporting the latest advances of document analysis and recognition on complex documents using advanced techniques. Papers submitted to the journal track should follow the format of IJDAR submissions and all of the standard guidelines.

Andreas Fischer, Rolf Ingold, and Marcus Liwicki – ICDAR 2021 General Chairs
(info@icdar2021.org)

See more…


4) ICPR 2020 conference (second round)

25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
10-15 January 2021 – Milan, Italy

For the first time ever, ICPR is providing a two-round paper submission and review process. The second round is now open.
In this second round, you can either submit a new paper or resubmit a revised and improved version of a paper that was not accepted in the first round.

Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to submit your latest work to ICPR2020.

The ICPR2020 General Chairs

Clarifications on the reviewing system and more information will appear on the ICPR2020 website soon.

We are considering offering a mixed virtual and in-person conference solution, so as to allow multiple participation options for people with different circumstances. We will share updates as soon as we have taken decisions on this.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Paper submission (first round): April 15th, 2020 (extended)
Paper submission (second round): July 15th, 2020
Tutorials proposal: April 1st, 2020
Demos and exhibits proposal: June 15th, 2020

General Chairs
Rita Cucchiara, Alberto del Bimbo, Stan Sclaroff

See more…


5) ICDAR2021 competition

The ICDAR2021 Organizing Committee invites proposals for Competitions that aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods related to areas of document analysis and recognition.

Note that we distinguish between long and short-term competitions, they share the same rules but a different calendar. The long-term competitions should be open for a longer time period and address challenges where teams can work for a year on them. Short-term competitions will be announced later and can address very recent challenges. Furthermore, long competitions will be specially featured through special awards and prominent communication with oral sessions in the main conference.

Important Dates

June 12, 2020: Long-Term Competition Proposal Due
July 1, 2020: Long-Term Competition Acceptance Notification
September 4, 2020: Short-Term Competition Proposal Due
September 30, 2020: Short-Term Competition Acceptance Notification

March 31, 2021: Suggested deadline for competition participants
May 03, 2021: Initial Submission of Competition Reports Deadline
(papers must be sent directly to the Competition Chairs)
May 31, 2021: Camera-Ready Papers Due

Proposal

You are cordially invited to submit a proposal, that should contain the following information:

  • A brief description of the competition (not more than 1 page), including what the particular task under evaluation is and why this competition is of interest to the ICDAR community.
  • A draft of the outline of the competition describing competition schedule, the expected number of participants and its rationale, which data is planned to be used, how will the submitted methods be evaluated and which performance measures will be used.
  • The names, contact information, and brief CVs of the competition organizers, outlining previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions.

The following rules shall apply to the accepted competition:

  • The name of the competition must be standardized by starting with “ICDAR 2021” e.g. “ICDAR 2021 Competition on …” or “ICDAR 2021 … Competition.”
  • Datasets used in the competitions must be made available after the end of the competitions. If the competition has already occured, the previous dataset should already be available. In principle, the organizers should submit the dataset to http://tc11.cvc.uab.es/
  • Evaluation methodologies and metrics used must be described in detail so that results can be replicated later. Especially for the long-term competitions, it is preferable that the evaluation methodologies are open source and can be easily accessible from the participants but also from the research community.
  • Participants should not have access to the ground-truthed dataset until the end of the competition, the evaluation should be done by the organizers.
  • The basic length of reports of the competitions is the same as for the regular paper (i.e., 6 pages). If there are circumstances to be considered, upon request, Competition Chairs may allow additional pages for the competitions reports, if necessary.
  • The results of competitions will be announced during a dedicated session of the ICDAR 2021 conference.
  • Each competition has to be presented with a poster at a prominent place at the conference venue. All accepted long-term competitions will be presented orally in a dedicated session as mentioned above.

Based on the analysis of the received proposals, the competitions chairs will first synchronize with the competitions organizers and then submit a proposal to the program committee, in order to finalize the organization of the competitions.

Submission Guidelines & Inquiries

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Competition Chairs via: competition-chairs@icdar2021.org

Note that we opt at accepting a significantly lower number of competitions than in the past. We encourage that competitions are open for a longer time (long-term). For any inquiries you may have regarding the competitions, please contact us via above email.

Harold Mouchère and Foteini Simistira Liwicki
Competitions Chairs of ICDAR 2021
Email: competition-chairs@icdar2021.org

For more information, please download PDF call or visit: https://icdar2021.org/calls/call-for-competitions/


6) Job offers (1 new)

— Post-doc position – L3i – La Rochelle France (new) —

Automatic classification of business documents

The LabCom IDEAS calls for applications for a post-doctoral position in computer science, in the field of machine learning, for the classification of business documents.

Duration: 12 months (with possibilities of renewal)
Desired hiring date: September 1 st , 2020 (may be modified according to the sanitary situation)
Take-home salary: 2100 € / month (French public healthcare coverage included)
Workplace: LabCom IDEAS, on the premises of the L3i laboratory in La Rochelle, France
Specialties: Computer Science / Machine Learning / Classification / Image Analysis / Automatic Language Processing

Description of the LabCom:

The post-doc fellow will be based in the LabCom, located in the premises of the Laboratory L3i, in La Rochelle, France.

Yooz, Labcom’s industrial partner, is a provider of a Cloud service for automating purchasing and payment processes. Yooz integrates Artificial Intelligence technologies to automate the processes and document processing involved in these processes. The yooz service is used daily by nearly 3000 users.
The research and development carried out within the LabCom focuses on 3 main areas:

  • Document classification
  • Document search
  • Document fraud detection

Job description:

The work of the post-doc fellow will fall within the framework of the area “Document Classification”. The aim is to design innovative approaches for classifying documents (according to their nature: invoice, quotation, bank account details, …) in multi-channel incoming document flows and to create, from these approaches, a prototype.

Candidate Profile:

The candidate, who holds a Ph.D. in the fields of computer science, computer engineering, signal processing, or applied mathematics, must have a significant research experience in at least two of the following areas:

  • Machine learning / classification
  • Image analysis
  • Pattern recognition

Moreover, knowledge or experience of Automatic Language Processing would be appreciated.

The candidate’s skills will include:

  • Mastering one or more programming languages (Java, Python, C/C++…)
  • Very good teamwork skills, having knowledge or experience of Agile methods would be a plus (a the work will be carried out both in conjunction with researchers from the L3i laboratory and the R&D department of the Yooz company).
  • Good scientific writing skills, and fluency in writing and speaking English.

To apply:

Candidates for this position should send a CV and a cover letter (names and reference details would be appreciated) to:

muriel.visani [at] univ-lr.fr
nicolas.sidere [at] univ-lr.fr
Vincent.PoulaindAndecy [at] getyooz.com
Aurelie.Joseph [at] getyooz.com

Applications will be considered as they arise, so there is no strict deadline for applying, even though we would prefer to have selected the best applicant by mid-July.

See full description: https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ENversion_20-_20PostDoc2020_20-_20Document_20Classification_20-_20La_20Rochelle_20-_20FRANCE.pdf

— Post-doc position – L3i – La Rochelle France (repost) —

Title: Detection and verification of visual security devices in documents

The L3i laboratory has an open post-doc position in computer science, in the specific field of document image analysis and pattern recognition

Duration: 12 months
Position available from: April 1st, 2019
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, La Rochelle University, France
Specialty: Computer Science/ Image Processing/ Document Analysis/ Pattern Recognition

Contact: petra.gomez[at]univ-lr.fr, sylvain.marchand[at]univ-lr.fr, jcburie[at]univ-lr.fr

Position Description

The L3i is a research lab of the University of La Rochelle. La Rochelle is a city in the south west of France on the Atlantic coast and is one of the most attractive and dynamic cities in France. The L3i works since several years on document analysis and has developed a well-known expertise in fraud detection.

The work done by the post-doc will take part of a project with a private company. The objective is to develop detection and verification methods of the security visual devices in order to check the authenticity of the documents. For example, some security visual devices consist in adding a hologram. However, many other security devices exist. The particularity will be to use the video stream of a mobile phone as the source of information. Some security devices will be studied to determine the ones that are able to ensure the authenticity of the documents. A specific acquisition protocol may be proposed to improve the robustness of the algorithms. Real-time implementation of the proposed methods will be necessary.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a completed PhD and a research experience in image processing and analysis, video analysis and pattern recognition. Some knowledge and experience in colour image/video processing are also recommended.

General Qualifications

• Good programming skills mastering at least one programming language like Java, Python, C/C++
• Good teamwork skills
• Good writing skills and proficiency in written and spoken English or French

Applications

A motivation letter and CV along-with list of publications should be addressed to: petra.gomez[at]univ-lr.fr, sylvain.marchand[at]univ-lr.fr, jcburie[at]univ-lr.fr
Copies of a few of the most relevant publications are welcome.

See the following file: https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Post-Doc_IDECYS_final_GB-1.pdf

— Post-doc position – L3i – La Rochelle France (repost) —

Title : Recognition of text with variable styles in comics books

Duration: 12 months
Position available from: May 1st, 2019
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, University of La Rochelle, France
Specialty: Computer Science/ Image Processing/ Document Analysis/ Pattern Recognition
Contact: Jean-Christophe BURIE (jcburie [at] univ-lr.fr)

Position description

See the following file: https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/post-doc-L3i_BD.pdf