[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 155 – May 2023

Welcome to the May edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find several announcements related to ICDAR 2023 (registration is open): the call for doctoral consortium, the call for nominations for outstanding achievements award and the call for hosting ICDAR 2026. GREC 2023 post conference workshop will be held on August 24th in San José, California, USA. Registration to the next summer school on document analysis (SSDA) is also open and will take place in Fribourg, Switzerland this coming July. Finally, please find the summary of the last IJDAR issue and a new job offer in Barcelona.

I wish you a pleasant reading,

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

2023

  • Deadlines:
    • June 5, full paper submission deadline TPDL 2023
    • June 26, doctoral consortium application deadline ICDAR 2023
    • June 30, hosting proposal due ICDAR2026
  • Events:
    • July 3-7, 2023, summer school SSDA 2023, Fribourg, Switzerland
    • August 21-23, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • August 24, doctoral consortium of ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • August 24, workshop GREC 2023, San José, California, USA

2024 and later

  • Events:
    • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

2) ICDAR 2023: Call 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, ICDAR 2019, and ICDAR 2021. The tradition of having a Doctoral Consortium as a satelite event to the ICDAR main conference will further be continued at ICDAR 2023 in San José, California, USA.

The goal of the ICDAR 2023 Doctoral Consortium is to create an opportunity for PhD 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 2023 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application by June 26, 2023. 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. There will be no extra registration fees.

The ICDAR 2023 Doctoral Consortium will take place the day after the main conference, i.e., on Thursday, August 24.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Students willing to participate should submit an application in a SINGLE PDF file. The submission should be prepared using the instructions and style files for Springer computer science proceedings. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded here. It is also available on Overleaf.

The PDF file 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 June 26, 2023 to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcicdar2023

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission deadline: June 26, 2023
  • Acceptance notification and Mentor assignment: July 10, 2023
  • Mentoring period: July 10 to August 24, 2023
  • Doctoral consortium: August 24, 2023

We are looking forward to your participation!

Andreas Fischer and Veronica Romero, Doctoral Consortium Chairs, dc-chairs@icdar2023.org


3) ICDAR 2023: Call for Nominations for the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

Important Dates

Nominations Due:  April 30, 2023

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

There are two awards categories, which have been presented together bi-annually in the past: The Young Investigator Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made) and the Outstanding Achievements Award. Because of the new yearly schedule of ICDAR, the two categories will alternate in odd and even years.

For ICDAR 2023, nominations are invited for the following award category:

IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

The award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient will be invited to give the opening keynote speech at the ICDAR 2023 conference, introduced by the previous recipient of the award.

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 nominations packs electronically to the TC10/11 chairs: Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr. The deadline for receiving nominations is April 30, 2023 but early submissions are strongly encouraged.


4) Call for Hosting Proposals: ICDAR 2026

Deadline: June 30, 2023

Submission Method: Email to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr

The International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) is the flagship event of TC10/11. It has been established as a bi-annual conference in 1991 and is now held annually, starting 2023. The aim of ICDAR is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition. The ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking proposals to host the 20th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in 2026 (ICDAR 2026).

Any consortium interested in making a proposal to host an ICDAR should first familiarise themselves with the “Guidelines for Organizing and Bidding to Host ICDAR” document which is available on the TC10 and TC11 websites (https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr and http://www.iapr-tc11.org, respectively).

A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Please check on the website of TC11 for the latest version.

Note that the current guidelines still refer to a bi-annual event. An updated version is coming soon that will reflect the change to an annual conference.

http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/images/ICDAR_Guidelines_2016_02_27.pdf

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures outlined in that document.

The submitted proposal must define clearly the items specified in the guidelines (Section 5.2).

It has been the tradition that the location of ICDAR conferences follows a rotating schedule among different continents. Hence, proposals from the Americas are strongly encouraged. However, high quality bids from other locations, for example, from countries where we have had no ICDAR before, will also be considered. Proposals will be examined by the ICDAR Advisory Board.

Proposals should be emailed to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer andreas.fischer@hefr.ch and Jean-Christophe Burie jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr by June 30, 2023.

ICDAR Advisory Board,
Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11), Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10), Anna Esposito (Chair, IAPR C&M), C.V. Jawahar, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Koichi Kise


5) GREC 2023 – repost

15th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC)

August 24, 2023
San Jose, USA - post conference workshop of ICDAR2023
http://grec2023.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 2023 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), Sydney (Australia) and Lausanne (Switzerland).

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.

Important dates

Abstract submission: April 17th, 2023
Full paper submission: April 24th, 2023 – 11:59PM Pacific Time Zone

Acceptance notification: May 24th, 2023
Camera ready due: May 31th, 2023

Workshop: August 24th, 2023

More information at: http://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/
Registration is open: https://icdar2023.org/registration/

General Chair: Jean-Christophe Burie
Program Co-Chair: Nathalie Girard, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Samit Biswas


6) 5th TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2023)

Website: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch
Dates: July 3-7, 2023
Location: Fribourg and Moléson-sur-Gruyères, Switzerland

Important Dates

May  4, 2023  Registration open
May 22 June 8, 2023  Application for financial assistance
Jun  5, 2023  End for Early bird registration
Jun 23, 2023  Registration closed 

We are pleased to announce that the 5th TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis and Recognition (SSDA), endorsed by TC-10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC-11 (Reading Systems), will be held in Switzerland from July 3 to 7, 2023.

SSDA 2023 continues the tradition of the past summer schools held in Jaipur (India) in 2017, La Rochelle (France) in 2018, Islamabad (Pakistan) in 2019, and Luleå (Sweden) in 2021.

A link for online registration will be available here on May 4, 2023. As it will be a in person event, the number of places is limited. First come, first served. We would like to welcome you all, but in case all the places are taken, a waiting list will be set up. Several grants are available for students, specifically for students coming from countries with low financial status. More information here. The deadline for submitting an application for financial support is May 22, 2023.

The scientific theme of the SSDA 2023 is Statistical and Structural Methods for Document Analysis. The theme highlights the importance of both statistical and structural pattern recognition approaches. The latter plays a central role for understanding not only the individual elements of a document but also their relations. With the advent of Transformers for sequence analysis and geometric deep learning for graph-based analysis, new perspectives are opening up in the field of structural deep learning. Topics of interest include document image processing, indexing and retrieval of documents, handwriting recognition, historical document analysis, document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, and document understanding, among others.

The SSDA is also a great occasion to get in touch with experienced researchers from the field of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR). The following invited speakers have already agreed to hold a lecture at the summer school (list is still subject to change):

Besides traditional lectures, a focus will be put on practical sessions, with a programming competition in document analysis. The summer school is also an opportunity to meet young and not so young researchers in the community. Therefore, participants are asked to prepare a short pitch and a poster about their research.

Two awards will be presented on the last day of the summer school: the Best Poster Award and the Excellence Award, both with a financial reward. The winner of the Excellence Award will be selected among the participants for their knowledge, collaboration ability, and their performance in the competition.

In addition, to create and reinforce interactions between participants, several social activities will be organized depending on the weather, such as a visit of an alpine cheese factory, a visit of the medieval town of Gruyère and its castle, and a panoramic walk up to 2000 meters of altitude to the summit of the Moléson mountain.

As Switzerland’s cost of living is expensive, in order to reduce the fees for students and to provide a stimulating work environment, the SSDA will be organized as follows: on the first and the last day (Monday and Friday), it will take place on the university campus in Fribourg. During the week (Monday evening until Friday morning), the summer school will be held in a chalet in the mountains near Fribourg. The registration fees are all-inclusives: scientific program, social activities, accommodation, all meals and coffee breaks.

Registration: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/registration/

Contact: ssda2023@hefr.ch


7) 1st Workshop on Automatically Domain-Adapted and Personalized Document Analysis (ADAPDA)

August 25, 2023
San Jose, USA - post conference workshop of ICDAR2023
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/adapdaicdar23

SCOPE

Document Analysis (DA) technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive in our daily life due to the digitalization of documents (both in the cultural and industrial domains) and the widespread use of paper tablets, pads, and smartphones to take notes and sign documents. In this respect, high-performing DA algorithms are needed that are able to deal with digitalized documents from different writers, in different languages (including ancient languages, modern slang terms, or writer-preferred abbreviations and symbols), and with different visual characteristics (due to the paper support and the writing tool), often very peculiar to the application domain. In this respect, domain adaptation and automatic personalization strategies are worth investigating to boost the performance of DA techniques in the scenarios mentioned above, which are of great cultural, practical, and economic interest. Nonetheless, in some application contexts, writer-specific data may contain sensitive information (either personal or business-related). In the sight of this, specific privacy-preserving solutions and lightweight adaptation strategies that can be performed onboard on personal devices must be considered when designing personalized DA techniques. This workshop aims at gathering expertise and novel ideas for personalized DA tasks such as, for example, Handwritten Text Recognition, Handwritten Text Generation, Writer Identification, Writer and Signature Verification, and Handwriting Analysis. In particular, it welcomes contributions on training and adaptation strategies of writer, language, and visual-specific models, new benchmarks, and data collection strategies to explore the mentioned tasks in a personalized setting, as well as related works on the personalized DA topic.

TOPICS

The workshop calls for submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

○ Adaptation for on-line Handwritten Text Recognition
○ Adaptation for off-line Handwritten Text Recognition
○ Adaptation for Handwritten Text Generation
○ Adaptation for Document Analysis System
○ Domain-specific text and symbol recognition
○ Adaptation for Human document interaction
○ Adaptation for Mobile text recognition
○ Domain-specific document analysis
○ Privacy-preserving domain adaptation of handwritten data
○ Writer, Language, and Visual adaptation of Document Analysis models
○ Novel benchmarks and datasets for personalized Document Analysis

IMPORTANT DATES

20/05/2023 AoE: Paper submission deadline
28/05/2023: Paper decisions to authors
04/06/2023 AoE: Camera-ready deadline

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions should follow the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format and can be either:

Short papers in the range 2-6 pages (references excluded) 
Long papers in the range 6-12 pages (references excluded)

presenting on-going projects, datasets, final or preliminary results as well as innovative methodologies and tools.

You can submit your manuscript here: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ADAPDA2023 


8) 27th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

Dates: 26-29 September 2023
Full paper deadline: 5 June 2023 - extended
Short paper deadline: 12 June 2023
Innovation paper: 12 June 2023
Website: https://tpdl2023.dei.unipd.it/index.html

The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) is a yearly date for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics. For over twenty-five years TPDL has been an international reference forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. TPDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries”, including new forms of information institutions; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing. Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide.

Representatives from academia, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage and humanities, and scientific communities.

This year its focus is on bridging the wide field of Research and Information Science with the related field of Digital Libraries. Indeed, TPDL historically approached on “Digital libraries” embracing the field at large also comprehending three key areas of interest that can be synthesized as scholarly communication (e.g. research data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science/computationally-intense research (e.g. scientific workflows, Virtual Research Environments, reproducibility) and library, archive and information science (e.g. governance, policies, open access, open science).

Contribution Types

Research Papers (up to 12 pages + unlimited references) present high-quality, original research of relevance to the TPDL community. Submissions should detail their methods and techniques sufficiently to enable replication and reuse. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks.

Practitioner Papers (up to 12 pages + unlimited references) present high-quality applied work of relevance to the TPDL community. Submissions should focus on results of direct relevance to practitioners and institutions in the TPDL community. Methods, tools, and techniques should be detailed sufficiently to enable application by other institutions. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should detail their methods and techniques sufficiently to enable replication and reuse. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented as long conference talks. Papers must be in the Springer LNCS style. The review process is single-blind, so you can include the author names in the manuscript you submit.

Topics of Interest

Submissions are welcome concerning theory, architectures, data models, tools, services, infrastructures about the following topics (but not limited to):

Publishing science
  •  FAIR data and software
  •  Research objects
  •  Nanopublications
  •  Digital Preservation and Curation
  •  Supporting Science Reproducibility
  •  Metadata
  •  Research Data Management
  •  Research Output Management
Data
  •  Data Search
  •  Research Data Discovery
  •  Data citation
  •  Data and Information Lifecycle (creation, store, share, and reuse)
  •  Data and Document Provenance
  •  Linked Data and Open Data
  •  Data Repositories and Archives
  •  Data and Research Infrastructure
  •  Data Stewardship
  •  Data cleaning
  •  Data Integration
  •  Data curation
Discovering science
  •  Information Retrieval
  •  Recommendation systems
  •  Document (Text) Analysis in support of discovery
  •  Multimodal and Multilingual Data Access
Monitoring and assessment of science
  •  Science of Science
  •  Scientometrics and bibliometrics
  •  Scholarly Communication Knowledge Graphs
Knowledge creation
  •  AI / Machine Learning/ Data mining for DLs
  •  Knowledge Bases
  •  Entity Extraction and Linking
  •  Ontology development
Digital Humanities
  •  Digital Cultural Heritage
  •  Digital Terminology
  •  Computational Linguistics
  •  Digital History
  •  Digital Archeology
  •  Knowledge Organization for Digital Humanities
  •  Digital Research Methods on Cultural Heritage
  •  Digital interfaces for Digital Humanities Research and Practice
Human-Computer Interaction
  •  User Interface and Experience in Cultural Heritage Institutions
  •  Information Interaction for Cultural Heritage Applications
  •  User Participation and Experience
  •  Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

More info: https://tpdl2023.dei.unipd.it/index.html


9) IJDAR article alert (vol. 26, issue 2)

Volume 26, issue 2, June 2023. Please find below the titles of its 5 articles:

WriterINet: a multi-path deep CNN for offline text-independent writer identification
Chahi, A., El merabet, Y., Ruichek, Y. et al.

Retrieval-based language model adaptation for handwritten Chinese text recognition
Hu, S., Wang, Q., Huang, K. et al.

Tables to LaTeX: structure and content extraction from scientific tables
Kayal, P., Anand, M., Desai, H. et al.

Refocus attention span networks for handwriting line recognition
Hamdan, M., Chaudhary, H., Bali, A. et al.

Adaptive dewarping of severely warped camera-captured document images based on document map generation
Nachappa, C.H., Rani, N.S., Pati, P.B. et al.


10) Job offers – 1 new

Post-doctoral position at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona

We are seeking one postdoctoral researcher to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain, focused on FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY.

The position is available for a minimum of 2 years and is linked to the “European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI” (ELSA), a European Project funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence.

CANDIDATE’S PROFILE

The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDAR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR.

The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and computer vision. Experience on document image analysis and/or visual question answering would be positive. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to co-supervise PhD students.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER

The selected candidate will work in the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the “HR Excellence in Research” award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favourable working environment.

The direct responsible for these posts will Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, leading the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC.

Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player.

RESEARCH CONTACT

If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information and applications (dimos@cvc.uab.es)

APPLICATION PROCESS

Apply by filling in the online form at:
Computer Vision: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/
FL and DP: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/

MORE INFO

ELSA project: https://elsa-ai.eu/
Computer Vision Center: http://www.cvc.uab.es/
Vision, Language and Reading group: https://www.vlr.ai/

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 154 – March 2023

Welcome to the March edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find the call for papers of GREC 2023 workshop that will be held in conjunction of ICDAR 2023 in San José and the list of other 8 workshops and 19 competitions of ICDAR 2023. The extended call for proposal of the document analysis summer school and its next edition which is already looking for a host as well. Finally, please find the summary of the last IJDAR issue and a new job offers in Barcelona.

I wish you a pleasant reading,

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

2023

  • Deadlines:
    • March 31, hosting proposal due SSDA2023extended
    • April 17/24, abstract/full paper submission deadline GREC 2023
  • Events:
    • August 21-23, 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • August 24-26, 2023, workshops, tutorials, and doctoral consortium of ICDAR 2023
    • August 25, workshop GREC 2023, San José, California, USA

2024 and later

  • Events:
    • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

2) Call for papers of GREC 2023

15th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC)

August 25, 2023
San Jose, USA
http://grec2023.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 2023 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), Sydney (Australia) and Lausanne (Switzerland).

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.
– Graphics recognition in Comics.
– 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.
– 3D models from multiple 2D 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 2023 conference papers. Papers should be formatted according to the instructions and style files provided by Springer. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded on the GREC Website (see Guidelines for authors at: https://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/index.php/guidelines-for-authors/).

Important dates

Abstract submission: April 17th, 2023
Full paper submission: April 24th, 2023 – 11:59PM Pacific Time Zone

Acceptance notification: May 24th, 2023
Camera ready due: May 31th, 2023

Workshop: August 25th, 2023

More information at: http://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/

General Chair: Jean-Christophe Burie
Program Co-Chair: Nathalie Girard, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Samit Biswas


3) Competitions of ICDAR 2023

Nineteen competitions are now up and running! Please find the list on ICDAR 2023 Competitions webpage and below to visit their websites, discover proposed tasks, datasets and participation deadlines.

https://i0.wp.com/icdar2023.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/ICDAR-2023-Logo-v10-color.png?fit=1818%2C461&ssl=1

Born Digital Video Text QA (BDVT-QA)

Detecting Tampered Text in Images (DTT)

Detection & Classification of Writing Activity in Air

Detection and Recognition of Greek Letters on Papyri
This competition investigates the performance of glyph detection and recognition on a very challenging type of historical document: Greek papyri. The detection and recognition of Greek letters on papyri is a preliminary step for computational analysis of handwriting that can lead to major steps forward in our understanding of this major source of information on Antiquity. It can be done manually by trained papyrologists. It is however a time-consuming task that would need automatising. We provide two different tasks: localization and classification or classification only.The document images are provided by several institutions and are representative of the diversity of book hands on papyri (a millennium time span, various script styles, provenance, states of preservation, means of digitization and resolution).

Document Information Localization and Extraction (DocILE)

Document UnderstanDing of Everything (DUDE) 😎
The ICDAR 2023 competition on Document Understanding of Everything (DUDE) proposes a new dataset for benchmarking Document Understanding systems under real-world settings that have been previously overlooked. In contrast to previous datasets, we extensively source multi-domain, multi-purpose, and multi-page documents of various types, origins, and dates. Importantly, we bridge the yet unaddressed gap between Document Layout Analysis and Question Answering paradigms by introducing complex layout-navigating questions and unique problems that often demand advanced information processing or multi-step reasoning. Finally, the multi-phased evaluation protocol also assesses the few-shot capabilities of models by testing their generalization power to previously unseen questions and domains, a condition essential to business use cases prevailing in the field. Submission deadline: 15 March 2023 AoE.

Harvesting Answers and Raw Tables from Infographics (CHART-Infographics)

Hierarchical Text Detection and Recognition (HierText)

Indic Handwriting Text Recognition (IHTR)

Language-Guided Document Editing (DocEdit)

Reading the Seal Title (ReST)

Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME)

Recognition of Multi-line Handwritten Mathematical Expressions

RoadText Video Text Detection, Tracking and Recognition (RoadText)

Robust Layout Segmentation in Corporate Documents (DocLayNet)

Structured Text Extraction from Visually-Rich Document Images (SVRD)

Text-based Video Question Answering on News Videos (NewsVideoQA)

Video Text Reading Competition for Dense and Small Text (DSText)

Visual Question Answering on Business Document Images (VQAonBD)


4) Workshops of ICDAR 2023

Nine workshops will be held in conjunction with ICDAR2023. Here is a list of their websites for more information and important dates.

Automatically Domain-Adapted and Personalized Document Analysis (ADAPDA)

  • This workshop aims at gathering expertise and novel ideas for personalized Document Analysis tasks (training and adaptation strategies of writer, language, and visual-specific models, new benchmarks, and data collection strategies), both on-line and off-line, with attention to privacy-preserving solutions.

Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition – 10th edition (CBDAR 2023)

  • The ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2023) will be the successor of the previous nine CBDAR workshops. The CBDAR series has a special focus on the analysis of camera captured documents and text. CBDAR is a forum for presenting up-to-date research, sharing experiences, and fomenting discussions on future directions in camera based document analysis.

Computational Document Forensics – 4th edition (IWCDF)

  • The Fourth International Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (IWCDF 2023) aims at presenting the most recent theoretical and practical advances related to digital document forgery while fostering discussions between academy and industry.

Computational Paleography – 2nd edition (IWCP)

  • The goal of this workshop is to bridge the gap between the different research fields analyzing handwritten scripts in ancient artifacts. It is primarily targeted at computer scientists, natural scientists, and humanists involved in the study of ancient writing systems and their materials, but it is not limited to these groups. By promoting discussion among these three communities, the workshop aims to encourage future interdisciplinary collaborations that will address current research questions about ancient manuscripts.

Graphics Recognition – 15th edition (GREC 2023)

  • GREC 2023 will 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.

Historical Document Imaging and Processing – 7th edition (HIP’23)

  • The 7th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP’23) will bring together researchers from various fields working on document image acquisition, restoration, analysis, indexing, and retrieval to make these documents accessible in digital libraries. It is the seventh satellite workshop of ICDAR dedicated to this topic, following HIP’11 in Beijing, HIP’13 in Washington, HIP’15 in Nancy, HIP’17 in Kyoto and HIP’19 in Sydney and HIP’21 in Lausanne (hybrid) that were a significant success with strong participation. HIP aims to provide the researchers with a forum that is complementary and synergetic to the main sessions at ICDAR on document analysis and recognition.

Machine Learning – 4th edition (WML)

  • Since 2010, the year of initiation of the annual ImageNet Competition where research teams submit programs that classify and detect objects, machine learning has gained significant popularity. In the present age, Machine learning, in particular deep learning, is incredibly powerful to make predictions based on large amounts of available data. There are many applications of machine learning in Computer vision, pattern recognition including Document analysis, Medical image analysis etc. In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and engagement between document analysis community and other research communities like computer vision and images analysis etc. here we plan to organize this workshop of Machine learning.

Machine Vision and NLP for Document Analysis – 1st edition (VINALDO)

  • The first edition of the machine VIsion and NAtural Language processing for DOcument analysis (VINALDO) workshop comes as an extension of the GLESDO workshop, where we encourage the description of novel problems or applications for document analysis in the area of information retrieval that has emerged in recent years. We also encourage works that include NLP tools for extracted text, such as language models and Transforms. Finally, we also encourage works that develop new scanned document datasets for novel applications.


Scaling-up Document Image Understanding (ScalDOC)

  • Document Analysis has long suffered from both a fragmented landscape of task-specific datasets and a strong focus on narrow-focused information extraction and document conversion tasks. The Scaling-up document Image understanding workshop aims to open the discussion on possible ways for the community to align data preparation efforts and define large-scale (grand) challenges that drive progress in the field.. This is meant to be one of a series of such events to be organized on our scientific forums in the near future. The aspiration is to set the seed for an initiative to create our own community’s document-oriented “ImageNet”, over which multiple long-term grand challenges can be defined.

5) Summer school call for proposal SSDA 2023 and 2024 – extended

Call for proposals: IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis

Important Dates:

January 23, 2023 Proposal Submission Deadline
March 31, 2023 new Proposal Submission Deadline

Note that proposals for organizing the summer school in 2024 are also welcome.

Please submit proposals via email to:

• Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative), foteini.liwicki@ltu.se
• KC Santosh (TC10 Representative), Santosh.KC@usd.edu

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, Islamabad, Pakistan, and Luleå, Sweden, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the fifth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2023.
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 2023 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. Note that submissions for organizing and hosting the 2024 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School are also welcome. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and 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 TC11Web site: http://www.iapr-
tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Guidelines_for_Organising_and_Bidding_to_Host_the_TC
10_/_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.
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: Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative) and KC Santosh (TC10 Representative).

Previous events:

As a reference, the 2021 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Luleå, Sweden with the theme Digital Transformation in a changing world (URL: https://www.ltu.se/research/subjects/Maskininlarning/Workshoppar/SSDA-2021?l=en)


6) IJDAR article alert (vol. 26, issue 1)

Volume 26, issue 1, March 2023. Here are the 5 articles of this issue:

YOLO-table: disclosure document table detection with involution
Daqian Zhang, Ruibin Mao, Runting Guo, Yang Jiang, Jing Zhu

Open writer identification from offline handwritten signatures by jointing the one-class symbolic data analysis classifier and feature-dissimilarities
Mohamed Anis Djoudjai, Youcef Chibani

Sequence-aware multimodal page classification of Brazilian legal documents
Pedro H. Luz de Araujo, Ana Paula G. S. de Almeida, Fabricio Ataides Braz, Nilton Correia da Silva, Flavio de Barros Vidal, Teofilo E. de Campos

Pho(SC)-CTC—a hybrid approach towards zero-shot word image recognition
Ravi Bhatt, Anuj Rai, Sukalpa Chanda, Narayanan C. Krishnan

Cover-based multiple book genre recognition using an improved multimodal network
Assad Rasheed, Arif Iqbal Umar, Syed Hamad Shirazi, Zakir Khan, Muhammad Shahzad


7) Job offers – 1 new

2x Post-doctoral positions at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona

We are seeking two postdoctoral researchers to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain, focused on (1) COMPUTER VISION and (2) FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY.

The positions are available for a minimum of 2 years, and are linked to the “European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI” (ELSA), a European Project funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence. The candidate researchers will focus on privacy aware methods for document understanding.

CANDIDATE ’S PROFILE

The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDAR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR.

The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and computer vision. Experience on document image analysis and/or visual question answering would be positive. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to co-supervise PhD students.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER

The selected candidate will work in the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the “HR Excellence in Research” award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favourable working environment.

The direct responsible for these posts will Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, leading the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC.

Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player.

RESEARCH CONTACT

If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information and applications (dimos@cvc.uab.es)

APPLICATION PROCESS

Apply by filling in the online form at:
Computer Vision: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/
FL and DP: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/

MORE INFO

ELSA project: https://elsa-ai.eu/
Computer Vision Center: http://www.cvc.uab.es/
Vision, Language and Reading group: https://www.vlr.ai/

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 153 – December 2022

Welcome to the December edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find call for workshop and tutorial of ICDAR 2023, the call for proposal of DAS2024, the last IJDAR issue summary and a new job offers in Barcelona (Spain).

I wish you a pleasant reading,

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

2022

  • Deadlines:
    • December 15 January 8, workshop proposal due ICDAR 2023
    • January 11, tutorial proposal deadline ICDAR 2023
    • January 15, paper submission deadline ICDAR 2023
    • February 28, DAS2024 hosting proposal due

2023 and later

  • Deadlines:
    • January 15, paper submission deadline ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
  • Events:
    • August 21-26, 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

2) ICDAR2023 Call for Workshop

The ICDAR2023 Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops that will be held after the ICDAR-2023 main conference. Researchers interested in organizing workshops at ICDAR2023 are invited to submit a proposal, including the following information.

  1. Title
  2. Preference for the duration (full day or half day) and date (August 24, 25 and/or 26, 2023)
  3. Scope and motivation
  4. Topics
  5. Relevance for ICDAR
  6. Potential committee
  7. Short CV of organizers

In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and engagement between members of other research communities and the document analysis community, in addition to the topics directly related to document analysis, Workshop Chairs also strongly encourage other research communities to submit proposals on recent other important topics which are used by the document analysis community. Workshops proposing discussions about topics dealing with an open vision of the notion of documents are also welcome.

Workshop Chairs also encourage the proposal of workshops related to document analysis systems, as well as industrial solutions and challenges.

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 April 15, 2023 or prior
  • About proceedings:
  • Workshop proceedings will be published by the through the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series 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 ICDAR2023 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.

Submission Guidelines and Inquiries

All proposals should be submitted by email to the Workshop Chairs (Alicia Fornes – Computer Vision Center, Spain and Mickaël Coustaty – L3i laboratory, La Rochelle, France) via: afornes***cvc.uab.es and mickael.coustaty***univ-lr.fr (please replace *** with atmark).

For any inquiries you may have regarding the workshops, please contact the Workshop Chairs via the above emails.

Important Dates

  • Workshop Proposal Due date: December 15, 2022
  • Acceptance Notification: December 30, 2022
  • Dates of Workshops: August 24 – 26, 2023
https://i0.wp.com/icdar2023.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/ICDAR-2023-Logo-v10-color.png?fit=1818%2C461&ssl=1

3) ICDAR2023 Call for Tutorial

Important Dates

Jan 11 2023 Proposal Due
Jan 31 2023 Acceptance Notification
Aug 24-26 2023 Dates of Tutorials

The ICDAR 2023 https://icdar2023.org Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials that will be held on August 24-26th (the correct final date will be communicated as soon as possible), before the main conference begins.

ICDAR 2023 Tutorials should serve one or more of the following objectives and we are especially interested in an NLP tutorial and practicalities of network implementation:

  • Introduce students and newcomers to major topics of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) research.
  • Provide instructions on established practices and methodologies.
  • Introduce expert non-specialists to a DAR subarea. Survey a mature area of DAR research and/or practice.
  • Motivate and explain a DAR topic of emerging importance.
  • Overview DAR systems for industrial solutions (suggestion for researchers in industry).
  • Introduce some recent innovative techniques for DAR research and software quality, such as open-source libraries, high-level API, technical frameworks for expert developments, etc. (suggestion for expert
    programmers).

An ICDAR tutorial should aim to give a comprehensive overview of a specific topic related to DAR. A good tutorial should be educational rather than just a cursory survey of techniques. The topic should be of sufficient relevance and importance to attract significant interest from the ICDAR community. Typical tutorial audiences consist of PhD students studying computer vision, image processing or pattern recognition, but also include researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry.

In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and interaction between researchers in academia and industry, the Tutorial Chairs strongly encourage proposals for industrial tutorials, in which researchers in companies describe DAR systems and overview industrial solutions to document analysis problems in real use-case industrial scenarios.

Proposals should be up to 4 pages in length, and should contain the following information:

  • Title of the tutorial.
  • Scope and motivation. A brief description of the tutorial, suitable for inclusion in the conference registration brochure.
  • Preference for the duration (full day or half day). Due to agenda constraints, half day tutorials are recommended. If a full day is needed, provide a brief justification.
  • A detailed outline of the tutorial. Course description with list of topics to be covered, along with a brief outline.
  • Relevance for ICDAR. A description of why the tutorial topic would be of interest to a substantial part of the ICDAR audience. Expected target audience in terms of composition and estimated number of attendees. Prerequisite knowledge of the ICDAR audience for attending the tutorial.
  • Short CV of organizers. A brief CV of the presenter(s), including name, postal address, phone number, e-mail address, web page, background in the tutorial area (projects, relevant publications or tutorial-level articles on the subject), evidence of teaching experience.
  • The name and e-mail address of the corresponding presenter. The corresponding presenter should be available for e-mail correspondence during the evaluation process, in the case clarifications and discussions on the scope and content of the proposal are needed.

Evaluation

The evaluation of the proposal will take into account its general interest for ICDAR attendees, the quality of the proposal (e.g., a tutorial that simply lists a set of concepts without any apparent rationale behind them will not be approved) as well as the expertise and skills of the presenters. We emphasize that the primary criteria for evaluation will be whether a proposal is interesting, well-structured, and motivated in relation to Document Analysis and Recognition, rather than the perceived experience/standing of the proposer.

Last but not least, the tutorial should attract a meaningful audience, cover hot topics and incorporate new knowledge to the community. Those submitting a proposal should keep in mind that tutorials are intended to provide an overview of the field; they should present reasonably well established information in a balanced way. Tutorials should not be used to advocate a single avenue of research, nor should they promote a product.

Notes:

Tutorial slides must be provided to us for inclusion on the conference website and also on the TC-10 and TC-11 websites, as educational material.

The ICDAR main conference organizers will handle the tutorial registration and provide the space, coffee breaks and other facilities required to organize tutorials (e.g. a room, a projector and a screen).

Submission Guidelines & Inquiries

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

Elisa Barney (elisa.barney@ltu.se)
Laurence Likforman-Sulem (likforman@telecom-paris.fr)

Feedback, comments and/or suggestions would be provided within two weeks of receiving the proposal. Final acceptance (or rejection) would be decided by January 31, 2022.

Inquiries should be sent to tutorials-chairs@icdar2023.org or the above emails.


4) DAS2024 Call for Proposal

Deadline: February 28, 2023

Submission Method: email to andreas.fischer@unifr.ch / jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr

Document Analysis Systems (DAS) is an IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches. In DAS 2022, it was decided by the participants to hold DAS as a satellite workshop with annual ICDAR starting from 2024 onwards. We are seeking proposals to host the 16th Document Analysis Systems workshop co-located with ICDAR in 2024.

Anyone interested in submitting a proposal to host DAS 2024 in Greece should drop an email to andreas.fischer@unifr.ch and jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr by February 28, 2023.

We are looking forward to receiving high quality proposals and making the
first chapter of DAS-ICDAR 2024 a big success!

Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10)


5) IJDAR article alert (vol. 25, issue 4)

Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2022
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/25-4

Advances in handwriting recognition
Utkarsh Porwal, Alicia Fornés and Faisal Shafait
Character spotting and autonomous tagging: offline handwriting recognition for Bangla, Korean and other alphabetic scripts
Nishatul Majid and Elisa H. Barney Smith
BCBId: first Bangla comic dataset and its applications
Arpita Dutta, Samit Biswas and Amit Kumar Das
Domain adaptation for staff-region retrieval of music score images
Francisco J. Castellanos, Antonio Javier Gallego, Ichiro Fujinaga – open access
A holistic approach for image-to-graph: application to optical music recognition
Carlos Garrido-Munoz, Antonio Rios-Vila and Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza – open access
A survey of historical document image datasets
Konstantina Nikolaidou, Mathias Seuret, Hamam Mokayed, Marcus Liwicki – open access
Combination of explicit segmentation with Seq2Seq recognition for fine analysis of children handwriting
Omar Krichen, Simon Corbillé, Éric Anquetil, Nathalie Girard, Élisa Fromont & Pauline Nerdeux 
A novel holistic unconstrained handwritten urdu recognition system using convolutional neural networks
Aejaz Farooq Ganai and Farida Khursheed
Conv-transformer architecture for unconstrained off-line Urdu handwriting recognition
Nauman Riaz, Haziq Arbab, Arooba Maqsood, Khuzaeymah Nasir, Adnan Ul-Hasan and Faisal Shafait
Benchmarking online sequence-to-sequence and character-based handwriting recognition from IMU-enhanced pens
Felix Ott, David Rügamer, Lucas Heublein, Tim Hamann, Jens Barth, Bernd Bischl and Christopher Mutschler – open access
Textline alignment on the image domain
Boraq Madi, Ahmad Droby and Jihad El-Sana

6) Job offers – 1 new

POSTDOC POSITION IN FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY – new

The Computer Vision Center (CVC), Barcelona, has a vacancy for a postdoc to work at the frontier between document intelligence and privacy preserving learning.

We are seeking a postdoc to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain.

The position is for 2.5 years. The position will remain open until a good candidate is found.

The position is linked to a European Project: the “European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI” (ELSA), funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence.

The specific focus of this postdoc position will be on applying federated learning and differential privacy to document intelligence tasks. The candidate will co-supervise one PhD student.

PROJECT PI & HOSTING GROUP

The direct responsible for this post will Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas. He is the leader of the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC. For more information visit: http://vlr.cvc.uab.es/

CANDIDATE ’S PROFILE

The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV.

The candidate should have a background in machine learning, federated learning and differential privacy. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to supervise PhD students.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER

The selected candidate will work at the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the “HR Excellence in Research” award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favourable working environment.

Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player.

SALARY AND CONDITIONS

Gross salary of 30-40k€/year depending on experience.

RESEARCH CONTACT

If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information and applications (dimos@cvc.uab.es)

APPLICATION PROCESS

Apply by filling in the online form at:

http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2022/12/07/postdoc-federated-learning-and-differential-privacy/

WEB SITES

ELSA project

Computer Vision Center

Vision, Language and Reading group


[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 152 – September 2022

Welcome to the September edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find call for competition and journal-track papers for ICDAR 2023, a presentation of the New Technologies Show at ECCV. Also the two last IJDAR issues and two new job offers in Barcelona (Spain) and Rouen (France).

I wish you a pleasant reading,

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

2022

  • Events:
    • October 16-19, conference ICIP 2022, Bordeaux, France
    • October 23-27, conference ECCV 2022, Tel Aviv, Israël
    • December 4-7, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2023 and later

  • Deadlines:
    • January 15, paper submission deadline ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
  • Events:
    • August 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

2) ICDAR2023 Call for Competitions

The ICDAR2023 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions that aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods related to areas of document analysis and recognition.

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

  • Contest title and abstract
  • A brief description of the competition, including what the particular task under evaluation is, why this competition is of interest to the ICDAR community, and the expected number of participants
  • An outline of the competition schedule
  • Description of the dataset to be used, and the evaluation process and metrics for submitted methods
  • 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 Competitions:

  • The name of competition must be standardized by starting with “ICDAR 2023” e.g. “ICDAR 2023 Competition on …” or “ICDAR 2023 … Competition.”
  • Datasets used in the competitions must be made available after the end of the competitions.  Specifically, the training data and ground truth must be publicly released and there must be a way to evaluate performance on a test set. This could take the form of an evaluation server, or the test data, ground truth, and evaluation script could be made publicly available. In principle, the organizers should submit the dataset to IAPR TC10 or TC11.
  • Evaluation methodologies and metrics used must be described in detail so that results can be replicated later.  Evaluation scripts must be released afterwards.
  • Each competition has to be presented with a poster at a prominent place at the conference venue, and selected competitions will get the chance to be presented orally in the dedicated session mentioned above.
  • Competitions must have a sufficient number of participants to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
  • Reports (full papers) on each competition will be reviewed and, if accepted (the competition ran according to plan, attracted a minimum level of participation and is appropriately described), will be published in the ICDAR 2023 conference proceedings.
  • Participants should not have access to the ground-truthed test dataset until the end of the competition. The evaluation should be done by the organizers.

Submission Guidelines & Inquiries

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Competition Chairs (Kenny Davila, Dimosthenis Karatzas, and Chris Tensmeyer) via:

competitions-chairs@icdar2023.org 

We encourage competitions proposals with a solid plan to remain active and challenging for the community over and above ICDAR 2023

For any inquiries you may have regarding the competitions, please contact us via above email.

Important Dates

October 28, 2022:                  Competition Proposal Due

November 15, 2022:             Competition Acceptance Notification

December 1, 2022:                Individual Competition Websites are Live

Mar 20, 2023:                         Suggested deadline for competition participants

April 10, 2023:                       Initial Submission of Competition Reports Deadline 

May 1, 2023:                           Camera-Ready Papers Due

July 1, 2023:                           Communicate Winners to Chairs

August 21-26 2023:               Presentation or results at ICDAR Conference


3) ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track


ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track Call For Papers of the 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition August 21-26, 2023 – San José, California, USA
https://www.springer.com/journal/10032/updates/23440814

Following a tradition established at ICDAR 2019 and 2021, ICDAR 2023 will include a journal paper 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.

The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions presenting original research in Document Analysis and Recognition. 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.

Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR, and will receive an oral presentation slot at ICDAR 2023. Authors who submit their work to the journal track commit themselves to present their results at the ICDAR conference if their paper is accepted. IJDAR’s publisher, Springer-Nature, will make accepted papers freely available for four weeks around the conference. After this, accepted papers will be available from the archival journal.

Format: Journal track papers submissions should follow the format of IJDAR submissions and the standard guidelines for the journal.

Procedure and Deadlines: While we permit a second round of submissions for the ICDAR-IJDAR journal track for both new submissions and revised papers from the 1st round of submissions, it must be understood by all authors that the full journal review process will be required for all ICDAR-IJDAR track submissions — there is no “short cut.” Papers submitted late in the second round run a 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 as a regular ICDAR conference paper.

Questions regarding the status of a paper that is under review for the IJDAR- ICDAR journal track should be directed to Ms. Katherine Moretti @Springer (katherine.moretti@springer.com). 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 their manuscript from the journal.

Important Dates

October 31, 2022
1st round journal track paper submissions due

January 4, 2023
1st round journal track paper notifications

January 15, 2023
*Regular ICDAR proceedings paper submission deadline

March 15, 2023
2nd round journal track paper submissions due

May 15, 2023
2nd round journal track paper notifications

Special Issue Guest Editors
ICDAR 2023 PC Chairs
– Gernot A. Fink
– Rajiv Jain
– Koichi Kise (liaison to IJDAR)
– Richard Zanibbi

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


4) ECCV New Technologies Show

New Technologies Show @ECCV 2022

Do you think that your research idea can generate impact?

Pitch it at ECCV!

Research ideas are the fuel for innovation. ECCV 2022 wants to give the stage to researchers to present not only the scientific virtues of their work, but also their ideas about how their research can lead to meaningful innovation, highlighting possible applications enabled by their research.

ECCV 2022 will host a “New Technologies Show”, where researchers are invited to pitch their technologies to a different crowd. A jury comprising entrepreneurs and innovation experts will give feedback to all participating teams, while the most promising technologies will be offered further mentoring post-ECCV.

All potential participants to the New Technologies Show, will be offered a short (~1-hour) online seminar prior to ECCV, on how to create a successful pitch. Research teams are invited to express their interest and encouraged to attend the online seminar before finally confirming whether they desire to present their technology in the New Technologies Show.

The New Technologies Show session will take place on-site. All participants to the New Technologies Show will be invited to the industry track reception during the ECCV.

Please use the online form to express your interest to participate:

https://forms.gle/vy9fwxaXPj2jC9Ay6

Important Dates:

Expressions of interest:                                             10/9/2022

Online Course:                                                            20/9/2022

Confirmation of participation:                                 1/10/2022

New Technologies Show session (on-site):           26/10/2022

Organisers:

Amir Markovitz (Amazon Research), Yair Kittenplon (Amazon Research), Shai Mazor (Amazon Research), Omar Zahr (Tandemlaunch), Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Center), Chen Sagiv (SagivTech), Lihi Zelnik-manor (Technion)

For any inquiries, please contact: industrychairs@ecva.net

Supported By:

TandemLaunch Inc.

– TandemLaunch will provide an hour-long online group workshop on preparing an investment narrative based on their invention.

– All applicants will be considered for an invitation into the TandemLaunch Startup Foundry Investment program.

Awards:

– Winners will receive 2 hours of Technology and IP Strategy mentoring and 1 hour of CTO career mentoring with the CTO of TandemLaunch.


5) IJDAR article alert (vol. 25, issue 2&3)

Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2022
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/25-2

Segmentation for document layout analysis: not dead yet
Logan Markewich, Hao Zhang and Seok-Bum Ko
Feature learning and encoding for multi-script writer identification
Abdelillah Semma, Yaâcoub Hannad and Mohamed El Youssfi El Kettani
Robust text line detection in historical documents: learning and evaluation methods
Mélodie Boillet, Christopher Kermorvant and Thierry Paquet
Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection with keypoint-based shape representation
Shuxin Qin and Lin Chen
Personalizing image enhancement for critical visual tasks: improved legibility of papyri using color processing and visual illusions
Vlad Atanasiu and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello – open access
Asma Naseer, Sarmad Hussain, Kashif Zafar, Ayesha Khan
Correction to: Personalizing image enhancement for critical visual tasks: improved legibility of papyri using color processing and visual illusions
Vlad Atanasiu and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello

Volume 25, Issue 3, September 2022
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/25-3

Scene text detection via decoupled feature pyramid networks
Min Liang, Jie-Bo Hou and Jingyan Qin
CarveNet: a channel-wise attention-based network for irregular scene text recognition
Guibin Wu, Zheng Zhang and Yongping Xiong
Fusion of visual representations for multimodal information extraction from unstructured transactional documents
Berke Oral and Gülşen Eryiğit

6) Job offers – 2 new

Postdoctoral Research Position on Document Intelligence and Privacy Preserving Learning – new

The Computer Vision Center (CVC), Barcelona, has a vacancy for a postdoc to work at the frontier between document intelligence and privacy preserving learning.

The position is linked to the European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (ELSA) project https://elsa-ai.eu/, funded by European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, and in particular on Document Visual Question Answering systems, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

The candidate is expected to have extensive experience in at least one of: document intelligence and/or private and robust collaborative learning (differential privacy, federated learning), and an appetite to learn.

All applications must include a full CV in English including contact details and a Cover Letter with a statement of interest in English.

Duration: between 30 and 36 months, depending on the start date

Salary: €40,000 annual gross, according to CVC labour categories

More information and application procedure:

https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/815190

http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2022/07/19/postdoctoral-research-position/

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070617. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.


Research Engineer Position on Information extraction, Text Recognition in Historical Document Collections – new

LITIS

LITIS (Laboratoire d’Informatique, Traitement de l’information et des Systèmes) is a research
laboratory associated to the University of Rouen Normandie, Le Havre Normandie Normandie,
and School of Engineering INSA Rouen Normandie. Research at LITIS is organized around 7
research teams which contribute to 3 main application domains: Access to Information,
Biomedical Information Processing, Ambient Intelligence. LITIS currently includes 90 faculty staff
members, 50 PhD students, 20 PostDoc and Research Engineers. The Machine Learning team of
LITIS is developing research in modeling unstructured data (signals, images, text, etc…) with
machine learning algorithms and statistical models. For more than two decades it has contributed
to the development of reading systems and document image analysis for various applications such
as postal automation, business document exchange, digital libraries, etc…

EXO-POPP project

Optical Extraction of Handwritten Named Entities for Marriage
Certificates for the Population of Paris (1880–1940)
Thanks to a collaboration between specialists in machine learning and historians, the EXO-POPP
project will develop a database of 300,000 marriage certificates from Paris and its suburbs
between 1880 and 1940. These marriage certificates provide a wealth of information about the
bride and groom, their parents, and their marriage witnesses, that will be analyzed from a host of
new angles made possible by the new dataset. These studies of marriage, divorce, kinship, and
social networks covering a span 60 years will also intersect with transversal issues such as gender,
class, and origin. The geolocation of data will provide a rare opportunity to work on places and
relocations within the city, and linkage with two other databases will make it possible to follow
people from birth to death.
Building such a database by hand would take at least 50,000 hours of work. But, thanks to the
recent developments in deep learning and machine learning, it is now possible to build huge
databases with automated reading systems including handwriting recognition and natural
language understanding. Indeed, because of these recent advances, optical printed named entity
recognition (OP-NER) is now performing very well. On the other hand, while handwriting
recognition by machine has become a reality, also thanks to deep learning, optical handwritten
named entity recognition (OH-NER) has not received much attention. OH-NER is expected to
achieve promising results on handwritten marriage certificates dating from 1880 to 1923. This
project research questions will focus on the best strategies for word disambiguation for
handwritten named entity recognition. We will explore end-to-end deep learning architectures for
OH-NER, writer adaptation of the recognition system, and named entity disambiguation by
exploiting the French mortality database (INSEE) and the French POPP database. An additional
benefit of this study is that a unique and very large dataset of handwritten material for named
entity recognition will be built.Laboratoire LITIS, EA 4108, Université de Rouen, 76 800 Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, FRANCE
Téléphone : (33) 2 32 95 50 13 Fax : (33) 2 32 95 50 22 Email : Thierry.Paquet@univ-rouen.fr

Missions


The research engineer will be in charge of the development of a processing pipeline dedicated
to optical printed named entity recognition (OP-NER).
He will closely collaborate with a Ph.D.
student in charge of Handwritten Named Entity Recognition (OH-NER).
OP-NER is the project’s easiest task and will benefit from the latest results achieved by the LITIS
team on similar problems on financial yearbooks. Images are first processed to extract every text
information. This will be achieved with the DAN architecture designed by LITIS which is a deep-
learning-based OCR (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12273). The research engineer will be in charge of
this OCR task. A benchmark of DAN against available OCR software such as Tesseract and EasyOCR
will also be conducted. Then the textual transcriptions will be processed for named entity
extraction and recognition. Named entity recognition is a well-defined task in the natural language
processing community. In the EXO-POPP context however, we need to define each entity to be
extracted more precisely to make a clear distinction between the different people occurring in the
text. For example, we need to distinguish between wife and husband names, and similarly for the
parents of the husband and of the wife, and so on for the witnesses, children, etc. An estimation
of around 135 categories has been established. The TAG definition was made by LITIS as well as a
first training dataset. Manually tagging the transcriptions has been made possible through the
PIVAN web-based collaborative interface (https://litis-exopopp.univ-rouen.fr/collection/12 ). This
platform provides in one single web interface a document image viewer, viewing and editing of
OCR results and text tagging facilities for NER. PIVAN eases the annotation efforts of the H&SS
trainees and allows for building the large, annotated datasets required for machine learning
algorithms to run optimally. The research engineer will oversee datasets generation and curation
as per the requirement of the EXO-POPP NER task, including the handwritten datasets.
The named entity recognition task will be based on a state-of-the-art machine learning approach.
We have started some experimentations with the well-known FLAIR NER library
(https://github.com/flairNLP/flair). We plan to continue developing and tuning the EXO-POPP
named entity recognition module using this library. The research engineer will oversee this task
entirely.

Tasks

• The research engineer will be in charge of tuning PIVAN for the OCR task. A benchmark of
DAN with the available OCR technologies such as Tesseract and EasyOCR will also be
conducted.
• The research engineer will be in charge of datasets generation and curation as per the
requirement of the EXO-POPP NER task, including the handwritten datasets.
• The research engineer will be in charge of developing the NER module.Laboratoire LITIS, EA 4108, Université de Rouen, 76 800 Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, FRANCE
Téléphone : (33) 2 32 95 50 13 Fax : (33) 2 32 95 50 22 Email : Thierry.Paquet@univ-rouen.fr

Deliverables:

Transcription of the typescript corpus
Named entities extracted from the typescript corpus

Skills :

• General software development and engineering, Python
• Machine Learning, Computer vision, Natural Language Processing
• Ability to work in a team, curious and rigorous spirit
• Knowledge in web-based programming is a plus

Position to be filled :
Positions: 1 Research Engineer
Time commitment: Full-time
Duration of the contract: September 1st 2022 – 31st August 2023
Contact: Prof. Thierry Paquet, Thierry.Paquet@univ-rouen.fr
Indicative salary: €24 000 annual net salary, plus French social security benefits
Location: LITIS, Campus du Madrillet, Faculty of science, Saint Etienne du Rouvray, France

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 151 – May 2022

Welcome to the May edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find the last call for participation for DAS 2022, ICFHR call for workshops, tutorials and competitions, a selection of workshop in conjunction of ECCV and ICPR conferences and a call for paper in a special issue of Pattern Recognition Letters journal: Advances and New challenges in Document Analysis, processing and Recognition at the Dematerialization Age. In addition, the in Memoriam of Professor Sargur N. Srihari from the IAPR newsletter.

I hope to see you soon in La Rochelle,

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

2022

  • Deadlines:
    • May 22, paper abstract submission deadline ICFHR 2022
    • May 31, workshop & tutorial proposal deadline ICFHR 2022
    • June 5, competition proposal deadline ICFHR 2022
    • June 6, paper submission deadline MANPU 2022extended
  • Events:
    • May 22-25, conference DAS 2022, La Rochelle, France
    • June 1-3, conference ICPRAI 2022, Paris, France
    • July 10-16, summer school ICVSS, Italy (Sicily)
    • August 21, workshop MANPU 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • October 16-19, conference ICIP 2022, Bordeaux, France
    • October 23-27, conference ECCV 2022, Tel Aviv, Israël
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2023 and later

  • Events:
    • August 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
    • September 2024, conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece

2) 📢 DAS 2022 Last call for participation

15th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2022)

May 22-25, La Rochelle, France
DAS 2022 participation will be hybrid (i.e., both in-person and online)

https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/

🎟️ Registration for DAS 2022 is open. Complete information about the scientific program, tutorials, and keynote talks is now available online, and summarized below.

ℹ️ About DAS

DAS 2022 is the 15th edition of the IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches for document analysis and recognition. The workshop consists of invited keynote speeches, oral and poster paper presentations, tutorials, and working group discussions.

Accepted Papers. The accepted papers at DAS 2022 cover a wide range of topics, including Image Processing, OCR, HTR, Forensics, Historical Document Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Deep Learning, and Datasets and Evaluation.

A Quick Summary of Paper Submissions and Acceptances:

  • 88 full-length papers were submitted for DAS 2022
    • 31 were accepted for an oral presentation, and
    • 21 for a poster presentation.
  • 16 short papers were also submitted to DAS 2022, and accepted for poster presentation.

🏖️ Location

DAS 2022 will be hosted by La Rochelle University (France) on May 22-25, 2022. The city of La Rochelle, situated on the central west coast of France, possesses a rich historical fabric including the Saint-Nicolas tower and urban heritage. In the early 21st century, the city has consistently been ranked among France’s most liveable cities.

🎤 Keynotes and Tutorials

  • Keynote 1: “Automatic Question Answering & Generation in News Archives” by Professor Adam Jatowt (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
  • Keynote 2: “The kiss of the Prince”: Bringing Document Content to Life by Professor Andreas Dengel (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany)
  • Tutorial: “Unlocking the Potential of Unstructured Data in Finance Through Document Intelligence” by Himanshu Sharad Bhatt (Research Director at American Express AI Labs, India)

📑 Program, Registration and Participation (In-Person and Online)

Final scientific program is available at: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/index.php/scientific-program-overview/

Please register at: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/index.php/registration-2/

For discounted accommodation options, please see: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/index.php/accommodation/

For information on traveling to La Rochelle, please see: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/index.php/on-site-participation/

For remote/online participation information, please see: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/index.php/online-participation/


3) Call for paper MANPU 2022 – deadline extended

5th International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding

August 21, 2022, Montreal, Canada
In conjunction with ICPR 2022
https://manpu2022.imlab.jp

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. The market of comics continues to grow, for example, the market in Japan is about 4.25 billion USD in 2015. Moreover, from the research 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.

Important dates

Title and abstract submission due: June 6, 2022

Paper submission due: May 13 June 6, 2022

Notification of acceptance: May 31 June 30, 2022

Camera-ready paper due: June 6 September 2, 2022

Workshop: August 21, 2022

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: http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr/

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

Paper Submissions

Submission and Review

All papers will have to be submitted through the EasyChair submission system on or before the submission deadline. Authors can update their papers before the submission deadline. MANPU 2022 will follow a single-blind review process.

Papers should be formatted with the style files/details available at Information for Authors of Springer Computer Science Proceedings. Only PDF files are accepted. A complete paper should be submitted in the proper format. Only Full paper (12-15 pages) is accepted.

See more information on the website :   https://manpu2022.imlab.jp/

General Co-Chairs

Jean-Christophe Burie (France)

Motoi Iwata (Japan)

Miki Ueno (Japan)

Program Co-Chairs

Rita Hartel (Germany)

Ryosuke Yamanishi (Japan)

Tien-Tsin Wong (Hong Kong)

Advisory Board

Kiyoharu Aizawa (Japan)

Koichi Kise (Japan)

Jean-Marc Ogier (France)

Toshihiko Yamasaki (Japan)

More info: https://manpu2022.imlab.jp


4) Call for Workshops & Tutorials ICFHR 2022

The ICFHR Organizing Committee invites proposals for workshops/tutorials that will be held on December 7, 2022, in Hyderabad, India. Researchers interested in organizing workshops or tutorials at ICFHR 2022 are invited to submit a proposal. The broad area of the submitted proposals for the workshop and tutorials could be topics of interest to ICFHR or the document image understanding and reading systems (that fall under the broad scope of TC10/TC11 of IAPR). The tutorial can be organized on topics of recent trends and tools used in the community. The proposal shall include the following information in a single PDF file:

Technical Information

  • Workshop/Tutorial title.
  • Topics that will be covered, with descriptions of why they are relevant.

Organizers and Speakers

  • Organizers’ names, titles, and affiliations and brief CVs
  • Names and affiliation of invited speakers. For each speaker, please indicate if attendance is tentative or confirmed.

Logistics

  • Preference for half-day or full-day events.
  • Estimated numbers of orals, posters, and invited talks, with a rough program outline. (if applicable)
  • Expected number of paper submissions (if planned)
  • Tentative program committee (for workshops).
  • Anticipated target audience and expected number of attendees.
  • Special space or logistic requirements, if any.
  • For workshops, also specify: (i) Paper submission deadline, (ii) Notification to authors, (iii) Camera-ready deadline.

Submission:
All proposals should be submitted by filling up this Google Form on or before May 31, 2022: Submission Link

Important Dates

  • Workshop and Tutorial proposal due: May 31, 2022
  • Notification to the organizers: June 15, 2022

Contact:
For any inquiries you may have regarding the workshops, please contact the Workshop Chairs.
veronica.romero@uv.es , mishra@iitj.ac.in

More info: http://icfhr2022.org/call-for-wt.php


5) Call for Competitions ICFHR 2022

The ICFHR2022 organizing committee invites proposals for competitions that aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods related to the field of handwriting recognition. 

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

  • A brief description of the competition, including what the particular task under evaluation is and why this competition is of interest to the ICFHR community.
  • A draft of the outline of the competition describing the competition schedule, the expected number of participants and its rationale, which data is planned to be used, how the submitted methods will be evaluated, and which performance evaluation 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 competition may be related to (but not limited to) the following areas:
    • Few-shot/zero-shot handwritten manuscript layout analysis/text recognition
    • Open set/open-world handwritten manuscript layout analysis/text recognition
    • Multilingual handwritten manuscript layout analysis/text recognition
    • Small size models for handwritten manuscript layout analysis/text recognition
    • Domain adaptation from printed to handwritten manuscript transcription
    • Transfer learning in handwritten manuscripts from one language to another
    • Degraded/low-quality handwritten manuscripts text recognition
    • Manuscript classification
    • Handwritten document image binarization
    • Historical scientific manuscript recognition
    • Image retrieval and text spotting for historical handwritten manuscripts
    • Detection, recognition and/or spotting of handwritten mathematical formula
    • Handwriting style analysis
    • Multi-script writer identification and retrieval
    • Online signature recognition and verification

The following rules shall apply to the accepted competitions:

  • Name of the competition must be standardized by starting with “ICFHR2022” (e.g. “ICFHR2022 Competition on …” or “ICFHR2022 … Competition.”).
  • Datasets used in the competitions must be made available through the TC10/TC11, online resources website after the end of the competitions (or equivalent arrangement by approval of the competition chairs).
  • Evaluation methodologies and metrics used must be described in detail so that results can be replicated later.
  • Participants should be encouraged to share their algorithms and code using one of the open-source licenses.
  • Competitions must have a sufficient number of participants (about 5, depending on the originality of the topic) to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
  • Reports (full papers) on each competition will be reviewed and, if accepted (the competition runs according to plan and is appropriately described), will be published in the ICFHR2022 conference proceedings.
  • Competition results will be announced during a dedicated session of the ICFHR2022 conference.
  • Each competition has to be presented with a poster at a prominent place at the conference venue, selected competitions will get the chance to be presented orally in the dedicated session mentioned above.
  • Based on the analysis of the received proposals, the competition chairs will first synchronize with the competition organizers, and then submit a proposal to the program committee, in order to finalize the organization of the competitions.

Submission Guidelines

All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the competition chairs (Rohit Saluja and Maroua Mehri) via: rohit.saluja@research.iiit.ac.in  maroua.mehri@gmail.com 

Important Dates

  • Proposal due: June 05, 2022
  • Acceptance notification: June 12, 2022
  • Suggested deadline for competition participants: July 17, 2022
  • Initial submission of competition reports deadline: September 18, 2022
  • Camera-ready papers due: September 25, 2022

Inquiries

For any inquiries you may have regarding the competitions, please contact the ICFHR2022 competition Chairs (Rohit Saluja and Maroua Mehri) via: rohit.saluja@research.iiit.ac.in  maroua.mehri@gmail.com

More info: http://icfhr2022.org/call-for-com.php


6) Workshop on “Text in Everything” – ECCV 2022

Tel Aviv, Israel, October 2022
In conjunction with ECCV 2022
https://sites.google.com/view/tie-eccv2022/home

Understanding written communication through vision is a key aspect of human civilization and should also be an important capacity of intelligent agents aspiring to function in man-made environments. Interpreting written information in our environment is essential in order to perform most everyday tasks like making a purchase, using public transportation, finding a place in the city, getting an appointment, or checking whether a store is open or not, to mention just a few. As such, the analysis of written communication in images and videos has recently gained an increased interest, as well as significant progress in a variety of text based vision tasks. While in earlier years the main focus of this discipline was on OCR and the ability to read business documents, today this field contains various applications that require going beyond just text recognition, onto additionally reasoning over multiple modalities such as the structure and layout of documents.

Recent advances in this field have been a result of a multi-disciplinary perspective spanning not only computer vision, but also natural language processing, document and layout understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, data mining, information retrieval, and more. The goal of this workshop is to raise awareness about the aforementioned topics in the broader computer vision community, and gather vision, NLP and other researchers together to drive a new wave of progress by cross pollinating more ideas between text/documents and non-vision related fields.

The workshop will be a hybrid, full-day event comprising invited talks, oral and poster presentations of submitted papers and a special challenge on Out of Vocabulary scene text understanding.

Keynote speakers

  • Xiang Bai (Huazhong University)
  • Tal Hassner (Meta AI)
  • Aishwarya Agrawal (University of Montreal, DeepMind)
  • Sharon Fogel (AWS AI Labs)

Topics of Interest

The workshop welcomes original work on any text-dependent computer vision application, such as:

  • Scene text understanding
  • Scene text VQA
  • Image-text aware cross-modal retrieval
  • Image-text for fine-grained classification
  • Text in video
  • Document VQA
  • Document layout prediction
  • Table detection
  • Information extraction

Challenge on Out-of-Vocabulary Scene Text Understanding

A challenge on Out of Vocabulary Scene Text Understanding (OOV-ST) will be organised in the context of this workshop. The OOV-ST challenge aims to evaluate the ability of text extraction models to deal with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, that have NEVER been encountered in the training set of the most common Scene Text understanding datasets to date. The challenge is organised jointly by Amazon Research, Google Research, Meta AI, and the Computer Vision Center.

To participate to the OOV_ST Challenge, please join through the RRC Portal.

https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=19

Important dates

Paper Submission Deadline:         August 1, 2022

Notification to Authors:                 August 15, 2022

Workshop Camera Ready Due:   August 22, 2022

Workshop Date:                                October 2022

Organisers

Ron Litman,                        AWS AI Labs

Aviad Aberdam,                AWS AI Labs

Shai Mazor,                         AWS AI Labs

Hadar Averbuch-Elor,     Cornell University

Dimosthenis Karatzas,    Computer Vision Center / Autonomous University of Barcelona

R. Manmatha,                    AWS AI Labs


7) Workshop on Identity Document Analysis and Verification – ICPR 2022

1st Workshop on Identity Document Analysis and Verification
Montréal (Québec), in conjunction with ICPR 2022.
https://www.icpr-ariadnext.com/

WIDAV focuses on addressing theoretical and practical works related to the field of identity document analysis, both from static images and from videos. This workshop will be the opportunity to share the last advances in the field of ID document analysis among the community.  It will mainly include works from the fields of machine learning, document analysis, and forensics.

Topics of Interest:  

– Document localization in the wild  
– Identity document classification  
– Optical character recognition (OCR)  
– Fraud analysis and detection


Important dates :  

– Submission deadline                                   06 June 2022
 – Acceptance notification                             15 July 2022
 – Camera ready version                                 01 August 2022
 – WIDAV2022 Workshop                               TBD

Submission, attendance and publications:  

– WIDAV 2022 invites the submission of substantially original, previously unpublished work and also welcomes ICPR 2022 re-submissions.  
– Attendance and presentations for this first edition will be fully remote
– Accepted papers will be published by IEEE and be available in IEEE Xplore.

To find more information, please visit the workshop website: https://www.icpr-ariadnext.com/


8) Workshop on Reproducible Research in Pattern Recognition – ICPR 2022

Fourth Workshop on Reproducible Research in Pattern Recognition
Satellite event of ICPR 2022
21 Aug 2022 Montréal (Canada)
https://rrpr2022.sciencesconf.org

This Call for Papers expects two kinds of contributions.

The track 1 on RR Frameworks is dedicated to the general topics of Reproducible Research in experimental Computer Science with clear links to Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. Papers describing experiences, frameworks or platforms are welcome. The contributions might also include discussions on software libraries, experiences highlighting how the works benefit from Reproducible Research.

In the track 2 on RR Results, authors are invited to describe their works in terms of Reproducible Research. For example, authors of papers already accepted to ICPR might propose a companion paper describing the quality of the reproducible aspects. In particular the papers of this track can focus mainly (but not limited) for instance on:

  • Algorithmic implementation details
  • Influence of parameter(s) for the result quality (criteria to optimize them).
  • Integration of source code in an other framework.
  • Known limitations (or difficult cases).
  • Future improvements.
  • Installation procedure.

For this track, the topics could overlap with the main topics of the ICPR tracks:

  • Geometry and Deep Learning (special track)
  • Discrete Geometry and Mathematical Morphology
  • Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
  • Computer Vision and Robot Vision
  • Image, Speech, Signal, and Video Processing
  • Document Analysis, Biometrics, and Pattern Recognition Applications.
  • Biomedical Image Analysis and Applications

9) Call for paper Pattern Recognition Letters – special issue

Advances and New challenges in Document Analysis, processing and Recognition at the Dematerialization Age

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/pattern-recognition-letters/call-for-papers/advances-and-new-challenges-in-document-analysis-processing-and-recognition-at-the-dematerialization-age

Description of the issue

Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) aims at the processing, extraction and recognition of information contained in documents and initially addressed to human comprehension. Almost all sectors (banks, public administrations, etc.) are living a digital transformation boosted by the current COVID pandemic emergency. Different technologies characterize this scenario: mobile devices, standard acquisition and processing tools, cloud computing, cybersecurity and privacy are just some examples. The document is now part of an integrated and extended system which not only considers it as a standalone element, but it is also linked to many different users and to other digital elements including other documents, metadata, digital contents, and database records.

This special issue is devoted to present and collect the most recent advances to process documents in the stand-alone modality as well as in an integrated and extended way.

Document indexing, Natural Language Processing, summarization and translation are crucial steps for digital document archiving and augmentation. Nevertheless, it is well known that digital document containing handwriting can convey very sensitive information about the writer: age, sex, emotion, identity and health status are just some examples. Under this light, the processing of these data is very relevant in many applications deserving specific investigation as well as privacy preserving.

Papers presenting reviews, alternative perspectives, new applications and methods in the field of DAR are welcome. Research contributions should have a significant advancement both in the state-of-the-art for document analysis as well as for machine learning and pattern recognition fields.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest to this special issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Document Layout Analysis evaluation, recognition, semantic information extraction and benchmarking
  • Camera-based document scanning, processing, segmentation, and recognition
  • Document Understanding and information extraction
  • Structured and unstructured documents processing
  • Natural language processing, information extraction and retrieval
  • Handwritten/printed document images, information extraction and retrieval
  • Document Indexing
  • Handwritten text recognition
  • Document typeface, script and writing analysis and recognition
  • Object detection and structure modeling: tables, forms, identification documents, drawn sketches, etc.
  • Biometrics: writer identification and signature verification
  • Soft biometrics and meta-data extraction and manipulation
  • Deep Learning vs Shallow Learning techniques in real and benchmarking scenarios
  • Real-time document analysis
  • Interoperability of systems (e.g. cross dataset evaluations, standards,etc.)
  • Document augmentation
  • Human-Document Interaction
  • Large digital archives

Deadlines

Submission period: 1-20 July-2022

Guest Editors

Dr. Donato Impedovo (ME) – University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy)
Dr. Byron Leite Dantas Bezerra – University of Pernambuco (Brazil)
Dr. Alejandro H. Toselli – Northeastern University (USA)
Dr. Giuseppe Pirlo – University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy)


10) IJDAR article alert (vol. 25, issue 1)

Volume 25, Issue 1, March 2022
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/25-1

TableSegNet: a fully convolutional network for table detection and segmentation in document images
Duc-Dung Nguyen
TG2: text-guided transformer GAN for restoring document readability and perceived quality
Oldřich Kodym, Michal Hradiš
MRZ code extraction from visa and passport documents using convolutional neural networks
Yichuan Liu, Hailey James, Otkrist Gupta, Dan Raviv
An end-to-end network for irregular printed Mongolian recognition
ShaoDong Cui, YiLa Su, Ren Qing dao er ji, YaTu Ji
A novel normal to tangent line (NTL) algorithm for scale invariant feature extraction for Urdu OCR
Asma Naseer, Sarmad Hussain, Kashif Zafar, Ayesha Khan

11) IAPR Newsletter summary – April 2022

The April 2022 Issue of the IAPR Newsletter is available at: https://iapr.org/docs/newsletter-2022-02.pdf

In this issue you will find:

• From the Editor’s Desk: Add your voice to theirs, Gender Visibility in the Pattern Recognition Community, a collection of Her Stories
• CALLS for PAPERS
• Calls from the IAPR Education Committee, Industrial Liaison Committee, and ExCo
• IAPR…The Next Generation: Vishal M. Patel, winner of the 2021 Young Biometrics Investigator Award at IJCB 2021
• From the ExCo: News plus Gender Visibility in the Pattern Recognition Community, Part 2
• In Memoriam: Sargur N. Srihari
• ICPR 2022 Registration, Workshops, and Challenges
• IAPR Technical Committee (TC) News: TC1, TC4, TC5, TC6, TC7, TC12, TC18 and TC19
• Meeting Reports: CIARP Porto, ACPR 2021,
DICTA 2021, CVIP 2021, WSB 2022, and ISPR 2022
• Bulletin Board: Pattern Recognition Letters Special Issues
• Meeting and Education Planner

Wishing you all happy reading!

Stay safe,
Jing Dong
IAPR Newsletter Editor
Associate Professor, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
jdong@nlpr.ia.ac.cn


12) Job offers – 1 new

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

Syntactical Models for Historical Music Score Recognition

PDF version: https://www.irisa.fr/offres-emploi/2022-03/syntactical-models-historical-music-score-recognition

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 researches 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, …).

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 18 months, starting as soon a possible
  • Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits
  • Location: IRISA — Rennes, France

Missions

The engineer fellow will work on the conception of an 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 self-adaptative OMR system for historical orchestra scores. The tasks are mainly:

  • define a grammatical description of musical notation, using the existing DMOS-PI method;
  • integrate symbol recognizers developed in another part of the project;
  • integrate anomaly detection into the system.

Logical programming from grammars and languages is expected in this work.

Applicant Requirements

Master degree or PhD in computer science.
Experience in document recognition or statistical analysis is expected but not mandatory.
Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have, as well as knowledge of music notation.

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 information in “Bande Dessinée” / Manga / Comics albums

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

Duration: 24 months
Position available from: October 1st, 2021
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, University of La Rochelle, France
Specialty: Computer Science/Image Processing/Document Analysis/Pattern Recognition/Deep Learning
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 be part of the 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 digital comics. The work will be done in a team of 10 researchers and engineers.

The work entrusted to the recruited person will consist in developing original approaches for extracting relevant information in comics panels in order to understand its content. The team has already developed some methods to extract panels, speech balloons, text, characters (persons), faces. However, the large variability of representation of these elements requires to propose different approaches or strategies. According to the skills and knowledge of the candidate, he/she will be able to work to improve methods dedicated to one of these elements.

Other challenges may also be considered such as :

  • Detection and understanding of the scenery (sea, countryside, city, …)
  • Detection and understanding of the context of the scene (battle, discussion, people eating, …)
  • Object detection and recognition (bicycle, car, table, chair, …)

Traditional and/or deep learning-based strategies can be studied to achieve these objectives.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a completed PhD and a research experience in image processing and analysis, pattern recognition. Good 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.

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 150 – March 2022

Welcome to the March edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find the approaching deadlines for ICFHR-IJDAR journal track, DAS short papers and MANPU pre-call for paper. In addition to this, you will find two postdoctoral positions in France.

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) Upcoming deadlines and events

2022

  • Deadlines:
    • March 14, tutorial proposal submission ICPR 2022
    • March 15, journal track submission deadline ICFHR-IJDAR
    • May 1, bid proposal deadline ICPR 2026
    • May 13, paper submission deadline MANPU 2022
    • May paper submission deadline ICFHR 2022
  • Events:
    • May 22-25, conference DAS 2022, La Rochelle, France
    • June 1-3, conference ICPRAI 2022, Paris, France
    • August 21, workshop MANPU 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • October 16-19, conference ICIP 2022, Bordeaux, France
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2023 and later

  • Events:
    • August 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA

2) Call for Papers: ICFHR – IJDAR Special Edition

As part of ICFHR 2022, we introduce the ICFHR-IJDAR journal track similar to ICDAR-IJDAR journal tracks in ICDAR 2019 and 2021. This journal track would provide the benefit of rapid and timely turnaround of the scientific developments to the community offered by conferences while maintaining the rigor and discipline of the journal review. We would like to invite exceptional works from the field of handwriting recognition that extend significantly from a typical conference paper.

Author Guidelines

  • Survey papers and papers introducing new datasets are welcome
  • Papers proposing tools will not be accepted. They should be submitted in conference
  • Papers should be well written, concise and clearly motivate the problem and communicate the proposed solution
  • Papers should be comprehensive, complete and self contained. They should not be understood only in association with other paper(s)
  • Submissions accepted for this special edition will receive an oral presentation in the conference
  • Manuscripts should be limited to 20 pages (two columns, double spaced and inclusive of figures), except for cases where the topic warrants additional space. Authors proposing papers longer than 20 pages should provide detailed justification to the editors in the cover letter for the submission. Editors will review requests on a case by case basis.

Areas of Interest

The topics of interest are identical to the ICFHR conference, which are the following:

  • Handwriting Recognition
  • Cursive Script Recognition
  • Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition
  • Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding
  • Language Models in Handwriting Recognition
  • Web-Based Applications
  • Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries
  • Information Extraction & Retrieval
  • Signature Recognition and Verification
  • Recognition of Handwritten Graphical Documents
  • Document Characterization
  • Layout Analysis
  • Form Processing
  • Word Spotting
  • Bank-Check Processing
  • Historical Document Processing
  • Forensic Studies and Security Issues
  • Writer Verification and Identification
  • Metrics and Evaluation
  • Electronic Ink and Pen-Based Systems
  • Other Offline and Online Applications
  • Writing in the Air

Important Dates

The timeline for the activities is given below.

ActivitiesDates
Initial submission deadlineMarch 15, 2022
Initial decisionsMay 15, 2022
Submission of revised journal papersJun 15, 2022
Final decisionsAugust 31, 2022

Guest Editors

Alicia Fornés
Utkarsh Porwal
Faisal Shafait

ICFHR Conference Page – http://icfhr2022.org/index.php


3) Call for short paper DAS 2022

What: 15th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems
Where: La Rochelle, France + online
URL: https://das2022.univ-lr.fr/

DAS 2022 is the 15th international IAPR-sponsored workshop dedicated towards system-level approaches and related challenges in document analysis and recognition. Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present demos and novel positions on document analysis systems. Short papers (up to 4 pages in length) will undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS2022 proceedings.

Submission link : https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=das2022

IMPORTANT DATES FOR SHORT PAPERS

15 March 2022: short paper submission deadline

01 April 2022: short paper acceptance notification

22 April 2022: short paper camera ready version

ABOUT DAS 2022

DAS 2022 is the 15th international IAPR-sponsored workshop dedicated towards system-level approaches and related challenges in document analysis and recognition. This includes models, methods, and relevant applications satisfying real-world engineering requirements. The workshop provides an exciting platform for interactions and high-level technical exchanges between industrial and academic communities. The DAS 2022 program will include invited talks, oral and poster paper presentations, tutorials, demonstrations, and working group discussions.

DAS 2022 will be held in the historical city of La Rochelle located on the French Atlantic coast. La Rochelle is famous for its old port, stunning seaside views, urban beaches, and for the second largest private aquarium in Europe. Online/virtual participation will also be available for DAS 2022 authors and participants.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

* 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


4) Pre – call for paper MANPU 2022

5th International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding

Pre - Call for papers (in conjunction with ICPR 2022)
August 21, 2022, Montreal, Canada

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. The market of comics continues to grow, for example, the market in Japan is about 4.25 billion USD in 2015. Moreover, from the research 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.

Important dates

Paper submission due: May 13, 2022

Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2022

Camera-ready paper due: June 6, 2022

Workshop day: August 21, 2021

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: http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr/

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

Paper Submissions

Submission and Review

All papers will have to be submitted through the EasyChair submission system on or before the submission deadline. Authors can update their papers before the submission deadline. MANPU 2022 will follow a single-blind review process.

Guidelines for the authors will be publish soon (website under construction)

General Co-Chairs

Jean-Christophe Burie (France)

Motoi Iwata (Japan)

Miki Ueno (Japan)

Program Co-Chairs

Rita Hartel (Germany)

Ryosuke Yamanishi (Japan)

Tien-Tsin Wong (Hong Kong)

Advisory Board

Kiyoharu Aizawa (Japan)

Koichi Kise (Japan)

Jean-Marc Ogier (France)

Toshihiko Yamasaki (Japan)


5) Job offers

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

Title: Combining Deep and Syntactical Models for a Self-adaptive Optical Music Recognition System applied on Historical Orchestra Scores

PDF version: https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/files/2021/10/SujetInge_Collabscore.pdf

Important Dates

April 1, 2022 - November 30, 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 self-adaptive 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, using the Isolating-GAN, a novel unsupervised music symbol detection method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN);
  • create a gradual mechanism for adapting the system to new partitions to build a self-adaptive system with few annotated data;
  • 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 (GAN, RCNN, SSD…), 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 information in “Bande Dessinée” / Manga / Comics albums

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

Duration: 24 months
Position available from: October 1st, 2021
Salary: approximately 2100 € / month (net)
Place: L3i lab, University of La Rochelle, France
Specialty: Computer Science/Image Processing/Document Analysis/Pattern Recognition/Deep Learning
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 be part of the 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 digital comics. The work will be done in a team of 10 researchers and engineers.

The work entrusted to the recruited person will consist in developing original approaches for extracting relevant information in comics panels in order to understand its content. The team has already developed some methods to extract panels, speech balloons, text, characters (persons), faces. However, the large variability of representation of these elements requires to propose different approaches or strategies. According to the skills and knowledge of the candidate, he/she will be able to work to improve methods dedicated to one of these elements.

Other challenges may also be considered such as :

  • Detection and understanding of the scenery (sea, countryside, city, …)
  • Detection and understanding of the context of the scene (battle, discussion, people eating, …)
  • Object detection and recognition (bicycle, car, table, chair, …)

Traditional and/or deep learning-based strategies can be studied to achieve these objectives.

Qualifications

Candidates must have a completed PhD and a research experience in image processing and analysis, pattern recognition. Good 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.

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 149 – January 2022

Welcome to the January edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find the extended deadlines for DAS and ICPR main conferences (both onsite and online), workshops and challenges. ICPRAI paper submission deadline is also postponed to the end of this month and a call for submission to its doctoral consortium is open.

The call for proposals for ICDAR 2025 remains open until February 28th, 2022.

I wish you an happy new year 2022 🎉

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

2022

  • Deadlines:
    • January 04 15, paper registration deadline – extended DAS 2022
    • January 10 17, paper registration deadline – extended ICPR 2022
    • January 17 24, workshop submission deadline extended ICPR 2022
    • January 28, challenge submission deadline extended ICPR 2022
    • January 31, paper submission deadline – extended ICPRAI 2022
    • February 1, doctoral consortium submission deadline ICPRAI 2022
    • February 28, bid proposal deadline ICDAR 2025
    • March 14, tutorial proposal submission ICPR 2022
    • April paper submission deadline ICFHR 2022
  • Events:
    • May 22-25, conference DAS 2022, La Rochelle, France
    • May 31, conference ICPRAI 2022, Paris, France
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2023 and later

  • Events:
    • August 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA

2) Call for Bids for ICDAR 2025

Deadline: February 28, 2022

Submission Method: email to faisal.shafait@seecs.edu.pk / jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr

ICDAR is the flagship event of TC10/11 which has been held bi-annually since its inception in 1991.
The aim of ICDAR is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to
promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition. Since ICDAR
will be organized as an annual event starting from 2024, the ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking
proposals to host the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be
held in 2025 (ICDAR2025).

A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Please check on the website of
TC11 for the latest version.

http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/images/ICDAR_Guidelines_2016_02_27.pdf

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures outlined in that
document.

The submitted proposal must define clearly the items specified in the guidelines (Section 5.2).

It has been the tradition that the location of ICDAR conferences follows a rotating schedule among
different continents. Hence, proposals from Asia are strongly encouraged. However, high quality
bids from other locations, for example, from countries where we have had no ICDAR before, will also
be considered. Proposals will be examined by the ICDAR Advisory Board.

Proposals should be emailed to Dr Faisal Shafait at faisal.shafait@seecs.edu.pk and Dr Jean-
Christophe Burie at jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr by February 28, 2022.

ICDAR Advisory Board,

Faisal Shafait (Chair, TC11)
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10)
Elisa Barney Smith (Chair, IAPR C&M)
Koichi Kise
C. V. Jawahar
Dimosthenis Karatzas


3) Call For Papers: Document Analysis System (DAS 2022) – extended

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

DAS 2022 is the 15th international IAPR-sponsored workshop dedicated towards system-level approaches and related challenges in document analysis and recognition. This includes models, methods, and relevant applications satisfying real-world engineering requirements. The workshop provides an exciting platform for interactions and high-level technical exchanges between industrial and academic communities. The DAS 2022 program will include invited talks, oral and poster paper presentations, tutorials, demonstrations, and working group discussions.

DAS 2022 will be held in the historical city of La Rochelle located on the French Atlantic coast. La Rochelle is famous for its old port, stunning seaside views, urban beaches, and for the second largest private aquarium in Europe. It is planned as a physical conference with support for remote attendance.

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.

DAS 2022 will accept both full papers (up to 15 pages, presented orally or by poster) and short papers (up to 4 pages, presented as posters or demonstrations). All paper submissions will undergo a rigorous review process that will consider the originality, quality of work, and presentation of ideas, and relevance to document analysis system research. Springer will publish accepted full papers as part of the workshop’s LNCS proceedings, while short papers will be published separately in a companion booklet.

See more on the website.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper registration deadline: January 15, 2022 EXTENDED (title and abstract submission on easychair)
Paper submission deadline: January 20, 2022
Author’s response period: February 21-28, 2022 (including rebuttal)
Notification: March 8, 2022
Camera ready: April 1, 2022
Conference: May. 22-25, 2022

SUBMISSION TYPES

DAS 2022 submissions should be in Springer LNCS format, full and short paper submissions will be accepted, as described below.
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=das2022

Full papers

Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research papers, up to 15 pages length, that are not being considered in another forum. This restriction does not apply to unpublished technical reports or papers included in self-archive repositories (departmental, arXiv.org, etc.) that are not peer-reviewed.

Short papers

Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present demos and novel positions on document analysis systems. Authors may submit short papers (up to 4 pages in length). Short papers will also undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS2022 proceedings.



4) Call for papers, workshops, tutorials, challenges: 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2022) – extended

This section contains 4 call for paper/proposal section corresponding to ICPR 2022 main conference, workshops, tutorials and challenges.

Main conference

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 17 Paper registration deadline EXTENDED
Jan 24 Paper submission deadline EXTENDED
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.

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

See PDF call for papers.

Workshops

The ICPR 2022 Workshop Chairs invite proposals for the 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition which is to be held in Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. Workshops can be half- or full-day, and it is also possible to hold workshops that will be operated in a virtual format but it is expected that most workshops will take place at the same venue as the main conference.
We seek Workshops on timely topics and applications of Computer Vision, Image and Sound Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. Workshops are expected to provide a forum for the active exchange of ideas and experiences. Members from all segments of the ICPR community are invited to submit workshop proposals for review. Each proposal will be assessed for its scientific content, proposed structure and overall relevance. Workshop organizers will be responsible for inviting speakers and ensuring their participation, submission and review of papers, and structuring leading discussion sessions.

Guideline for submitting proposals

The workshop proposal should be submitted via email to the ICPR 2022 Workshop
Chairs at workshops@icpr2022.com by January 17th 24th, 2022 (11:59PM Pacific Time) EXTENDED.
You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt by email within a few working days.

Important Dates

  • Workshop proposals due January: 17 24, 2022 EXTENDED
  • Workshop proposal decisions: February 14, 2022
  • Recommended workshop paper deadline: June 6, 2022
  • Early bird registration deadline: June 6, 2022
  • Conference: August 21-25, 2022
  • Tutorials/Workshops: August 21, 2022

Contacts

ICPR 2022 Workshop Co-Chairs:
● Jonathan Wu (Canada) – jwu@uwindsor.ca
● Laurence Likforman (France) – likforman@telecom-paristech.fr
● Giovanni Maria Farinella (Italy) – gfarinella@dmi.unict.it
● Xiang Bai (China) – xbai@hust.edu.cn

More details on PDF call for workshops.

Tutorials

The ICPR 2022 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials in conjunction with the 26 th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which is to be held at Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. We seek tutorials on core techniques, application areas and emerging research topics that are of interest within
the ICPR community. An effective and informative tutorial should provide a broad introduction to the chosen research area as well as in-depth coverage on selected advanced topics. Proposals that focus exclusively on the presenters’ own work or commercial presentations are not acceptable.

Guidelines for submitting proposals

To propose a tutorial, a PDF file containing the information outlined below must be
submitted by email to tutorials@icpr2022.com.

Important dates

Submission of proposals: March 14, 2022 [11:59 p.m. Central European Time ]
Notification of acceptance: April 11, 2022.
Early bird registration deadline: June 6, 2022
Conference: August 21-25, 2022
Tutorials/Workshops: August 21, 2022

More details on PDF call for tutorials.

Challenges

The ICPR 2022 Challenges Co-Chairs invites proposals for challenges to be held within the framework of the 26 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which is to be held at Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. The aim of the challenges is to advance algorithm and method development in Pattern Recognition by objective evaluation on common datasets. The challenge organizers are responsible for providing good quality data and defining objective evaluation criteria that are applied to the results of submitted algorithms.

Submission

Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the ICPR Challenges Chairs:
Dimosthenis Karatzas (dimos@cvc.uab.es)
Marco Bertini (marco.bertini@unifi.it)

Important Dates

December 20, 2021 January 28, 2022: Submission of proposals for challenges EXTENDED.
January 10 February 11, 2022: Notification of acceptance EXTENDED.
May 20, 2022: Challenge report due
June 6, 2022: Camera ready report submission
June 6, 2022: Early bird conference registration deadline
August 21, 2022: Challenge presentation date

If you have any questions, please contact the ICPR2022 Challenges Chairs.

More details on PDF call for challenges.


5) Call for Papers ICPRAI 2022 – extended

Endorsed by IAPR

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021 31/01/2022 EXTENDED

Printed in LNCS proceedings volume

You are invited to submit a paper for the third International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (ICPRAI 2022). It will be held in PARIS 1st to 3rd June 2022

See at https://icprai2022.sciencesconf.org

At the moment in Paris (France), we cannot predict what will be sanitary situation next June. In this context, we cannot schedule for sure, how the conference will take place. We hope most of you can travel for an on site conference, but an hybrid version is also possible.

Scope of the Conference

The conference aims to bring together researchers, students and practitioners of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, to present and discuss new advances.

Pattern recognition : recognition of different types of patterns, feature extraction / selection and evaluation, structural / statistical approaches

Computer vision : image processing / analysis, segmentation, object recognition, scene understanding

Artificial intelligence : machine / deep learning, expert systems, system interpretability, knowledge representation, perception, semantic analysis, intelligent systems

Big data : data visualization, volume / velocity / data variety, small sample size, supercomputing, cloud, data mining and performance evaluation

With applications related to: handwriting, document, text, language processing, e-learning, image processing / analysis, bio-medical imaging, remote sensing, image retrieval, 2D / 3D images and graphics, audio / video, multimedia applications, security and forensic studies, mobile applications, face, fingerprint, iris, brain, strategic objects and targets, industrial applications of PRAI, innovation and technology transfer, financial trends and analysis, traffic analysis and smart transportation systems, robotics and autonomous vehicles …

With 5 special sessions

and

3 keynotes

A Special Issue is scheduled for the best papers in IJPRAI journal

As well as a Special Section of the Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier) journal.

Proposed by:

Honorary Chair          Ching Y. Suen (Canada)
General chair              Nicole Vincent (France)
Conference Co-Chairs           Edwin Hancock (UK)
Yuan Y. Tang (China)
Program Chairs          Mounim El Yacoubi (France)
Umapada Pal (India)
                        Eric Granger (Canada)
                        Pong C. Yuen (China)

Key dates

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021 31/01/2022 EXTENDED
Author notification: 8/03/2022

Submissions

The conference solicits papers covering any of these topics. Papers will be 12 pages of content in the Springer LNCS style and should report on novel, unpublished work.

The proceedings of the conference will be published as a Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) proceedings volume.

Contact

icprai2022@sciencesconf.org

Sponsors are : IMDS , IDEMIA , LIPADE , Université de Paris faculté des Sciences


6) Call for ICPRAI 2022 Doctoral Consortium – new

Doctoral consortium: May 31, 2022 (a day before ICPRAI main conference)
https://icprai2022.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/6

This year, the steering committee of ICPRAI 2022 proposes the first version of the Doctoral Consortium (DC) as a satellite event to the main conference offering the opportunity to PhD students to present their work and meet senior researchers in their field of interest.

The goal of the ICPRAI 2022 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 ICPRAI 2022 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application. The Doctoral Consortium Committee 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).

Submission procedure

Students willing to participate should submit a participation package in a single PDF file. The submission package should be prepared using the following templates 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 relative to the topics of the main conference, 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 February 1st, 2022 via easychair (select Track “ICPRAI 2022 – Doctoral Consortium”) :

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: February 1st, 2022
  • Acceptance notification and mentor assignment: February 15th, 2022
  • Mentoring starting period: February 15th, 2022
  • Final material due: May 20th, 2022
  • Doctoral Consortium: May 31st, 2022

Registration

Participation to the Doctoral Consortium will be free for all accepted students, i.e., there will be no extra registration fees! The ICPRAI 2022 Doctoral Consortium will take place the day before the main conference, i.e., on May 31st.

Veronique Eglin, Daniel Lopresti
Doctoral Consortium Chairs


7) Job offers – repost

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

Title: Combining Deep and Syntactical Models for a Self-adaptive Optical Music Recognition System applied on Historical Orchestra Scores

Pdf version

https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/files/2021/10/SujetInge_Collabscore.pdf

Important Dates

December 1, 2021 (or later) - July 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 self-adaptive 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, using the Isolating-GAN, a novel unsupervised music symbol detection method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN);
  • create a gradual mechanism for adapting the system to new partitions to build a self-adaptive system with few annotated data;
  • 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 (GAN, RCNN, SSD…), 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 digitized 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 148 – December 2021

Welcome to the December 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

In this issue, you will find the foreword of ICDAR 2021 General Chairs and registered participants can still access the digital memory of the conference, both for the main conference and the pre-conference events. The Springer proceedings are also available online, with free access for everyone through the links on the conference website.

Following the strategic plan of the Document Analysis and Recognition community, ICDAR will be held annually from 2023 onward. The next two editions of the conference will be organized in San José, USA (ICDAR 2023) and Athens, Greece (ICDAR 2024). The call for proposals for ICDAR 2025 can be found below (deadline February 28, 2022).

Note that ICPRAI, DAS and ICPR deadlines are approaching. You will also find ICPR 2022 call for workshops, tutorials and challenges below.

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) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

  • Deadlines:
    • December 15, paper submission deadline ICPRAI 2022
    • December 20, challenge proposal submission ICPR 2022

2022 and later

  • Deadlines:
    • January 4, paper submission deadline DAS 2022
    • January 10, paper submission deadline ICPR 2022
    • January 17, workshop proposal submission ICPR 2022
    • February 28, bid proposal deadline ICDAR 2025
    • March 14, tutorial proposal submission ICPR 2022
    • April paper submission deadline ICFHR 2022
  • Events:
    • May 22-25, conference DAS 2022, La Rochelle, France
    • May 31, conference ICPRAI 2022, Paris, France
    • August 21-25, conference ICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
    • December 2022, conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India
    • August 2023, conference ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA

2) ICDAR 2021 Proceedings: Foreword from the General Chairs

Online version: ICDAR 2021 Proceedings

Our warmest welcome to the proceedings of ICDAR 2021, the 16th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, which was held in Switzerland for the first time. Organizing an international conference of significant size during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the goal of welcoming at least some of the participants physically, is similar to navigating a rowboat across the ocean during a storm. Fortunately, we were able to work together with partners who have shown a tremendous amount of flexibility and patience including, in particular, our local partners, namely the Beaulieu convention center in Lausanne, EPFL, and Lausanne Tourisme, and also the international ICDAR advisory board and IAPR-TC 10/11 leadership teams who have supported us not only with excellent advice but also financially, encouraging us to setup a hybrid format for the conference.

We were not a hundred percent sure if we would see each other in Lausanne but we remained confident, together with almost half of the attendees who registered for on-site participation. We relied on the hybridization support of a motivated team from the Luleå University of Technology during the pre-conference, and professional support from Imavox during the main conference, to ensure a smooth connection between the physical and the virtual world. Indeed, our welcome is extended especially to all our colleagues who were not able to travel to Switzerland this year. We hope you had an exciting virtual conference week, and look forward to seeing you in person again at another event of the active DAR community.

With ICDAR 2021, we stepped into the shoes of a longstanding conference series, which is the premier international event for scientists and practitioners involved in document analysis and recognition, a field of growing importance in the current age of digital transitions. The conference is endorsed by IAPR-TC 10/11 and celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with the 16th edition. The very first ICDAR conference was held in St. Malo, France in 1991, followed by Tsukuba, Japan (1993), Montreal, Canada (1995), Ulm, Germany (1997), Bangalore, India (1999), Seattle, USA (2001), Edinburgh, UK (2003), Seoul, South Korea (2005), Curitiba, Brazil (2007), Barcelona, Spain (2009), Beijing, China (2011), Washington DC, USA (2013), Nancy, France (2015), Kyoto, Japan (2017), and Syndney, Australia (2019).

The attentive reader may have remarked that this list of cities includes several venues for the Olympic Games. This year the conference was be hosted in Lausanne, which is the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee. Not unlike the athletes who were recently competing in Tokyo, Japan, the researchers profited from a healthy spirit of competition, aimed at advancing our knowledge on how a machine can understand written communication. Indeed, following the tradition from previous years, 13 scientific competitions were held in conjunction with ICDAR 2021 including, for the first time, three so-called “long-term” competitions addressing wider challenges that may continue over the next few years.

Other highlights of the conference included the keynote talks given by Masaki Nakagawa, recipient of the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award, and Mickaël Coustaty, recipient of the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, as well as our distinguished keynote speakers Prem Natarajan, vice president at Amazon, who gave a talk on “OCR: A Journey through Advances in the Science, Engineering, andProductization of AI/ML”, and Beta Megyesi, professor of computational linguistics at Uppsala University, who elaborated on “Cracking Ciphers with ‘AI-in-the-loop’: Transcription and Decryption in a Cross-Disciplinary Field”.

A total of 340 publications were submitted to the main conference, which was held at the Beaulieu convention center during September 8-10, 2021. Based on the reviews, our Program Committee chairs accepted 40 papers for oral presentation and 142 papers for poster presentation. In addition, nine articles accepted for the ICDAR-IJDAR journal track were presented orally at the conference and a workshop was integrated in a poster session. Furthermore, 12 workshops, 2 tutorials, and the doctoral consortium were held during the pre-conference at EPFL during September 5-7, 2021, focusing on specific aspects of document analysis and recognition, such as graphics recognition, camera-based document analysis, and historical documents.

The conference would not have been possible without hundreds of hours of work done by volunteers in the organizing committee. First of all we would like to express our deepest gratitude to our Program Committee chairs, Joseph Lladós, Dan Lopresti, and Seiichi Uchida, who oversaw a comprehensive reviewing process and designed the intriguing technical program of the main conference. We are also very grateful for all the hours invested by the members of the Program Committee to deliver high-quality peer reviews. Furthermore, we would like to highlight the excellent contribution by our publication chairs, Liangrui Peng, Fouad Slimane, and Oussama Zayene, who negotiated a great online visibility of the conference proceedings with Springer and ensured flawless camera-ready versions of all publications. Many thanks also to our chairs and organizers of the workshops, competitions, tutorials, and the doctoral consortium for setting up such an inspiring environment around the main conference. Finally, we are thankful for the support we have received from the sponsorship chairs, from our valued sponsors, and from our local organization chairs, which enabled us to put in the extra effort required for a hybrid conference setup.

Our main motivation for organizing ICDAR 2021 was to give practitioners in the DAR community a chance to showcase their research, both at this conference and its satellite events. Thank you to all the authors for submitting and presenting your outstanding work. We sincerely hope that you enjoyed the conference and the exchange with your colleagues, be it on-site or online.

Andreas Fischer, Rolf Ingold, and Marcus Liwicki
ICDAR 2021 General Chairs


3) Call for Bids for ICDAR 2025

Deadline: February 28, 2022

Submission Method: email to faisal.shafait@seecs.edu.pk / jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr

ICDAR is the flagship event of TC10/11 which has been held bi-annually since its inception in 1991.
The aim of ICDAR is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to
promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition. Since ICDAR
will be organized as an annual event starting from 2024, the ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking
proposals to host the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be
held in 2025 (ICDAR2025).

A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Please check on the website of
TC11 for the latest version.

http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/images/ICDAR_Guidelines_2016_02_27.pdf

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures outlined in that
document.

The submitted proposal must define clearly the items specified in the guidelines (Section 5.2).

It has been the tradition that the location of ICDAR conferences follows a rotating schedule among
different continents. Hence, proposals from Asia are strongly encouraged. However, high quality
bids from other locations, for example, from countries where we have had no ICDAR before, will also
be considered. Proposals will be examined by the ICDAR Advisory Board.

Proposals should be emailed to Dr Faisal Shafait at faisal.shafait@seecs.edu.pk and Dr Jean-
Christophe Burie at jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr by February 28, 2022.

ICDAR Advisory Board,

Faisal Shafait (Chair, TC11)
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10)
Elisa Barney Smith (Chair, IAPR C&M)
Koichi Kise
C. V. Jawahar
Dimosthenis Karatzas


4) Online Course on “Literate Models for Vision”

WHEN: Monday 20 December 2021 from 10:00 to 17.00 CET

WHERE: Online

HOW TO REGISTER: https://www.i-aida.org/course/vision-and-language-reading-systems-and-multi-modal-representations/

The Computer Vision Center (CVC) organizes a short interactive course on “Literate Models for Vision” offered through the International Artificial Intelligence Doctoral Academy (AIDA). Participants will have a chance to reconcile with the state of the art in reading systems, especially scene text recognition, and explore how image text enables us to tackle new and exciting computer vision tasks such as fine-grained image classification, cross-modal retrieval, captioning and visual question answering.


5) Call For Papers: Document Analysis System (DAS 2022) – repost

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.

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.

DAS 2022 will accept both full papers (up to 15 pages, presented orally or by poster) and short papers (up to 4 pages, presented as posters or demonstrations). All paper submissions will undergo a rigorous review process that will consider the originality, quality of work, and presentation of ideas, and relevance to document analysis system research. Springer will publish accepted full papers as part of the workshop’s LNCS proceedings, while short papers will be published separately in a companion booklet.

See more on the website.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: Jan. 4, 2022
Notification: March 8, 2022
Camera ready: April 1, 2022
Conference: May. 22-25, 2022

SUBMISSION TYPES

DAS 2022 submissions should be in Springer LNCS format, full and short paper submissions will be accepted, as described below.
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=das2022

Full papers

Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research papers, up to 15 pages length, that are not being considered in another forum. This restriction does not apply to unpublished technical reports or papers included in self-archive repositories (departmental, arXiv.org, etc.) that are not peer-reviewed.

Short papers

Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present demos and novel positions on document analysis systems. Authors may submit short papers (up to 4 pages in length). Short papers will also undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS2022 proceedings.



6) Call for papers, workshops, tutorials, challenges: 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2022)

This section contains 4 call for paper/proposal section corresponding to ICPR 2022 main conference, workshops, tutorials and challenges.

Main conference

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.

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

See PDF call for papers.

Workshops

The ICPR 2022 Workshop Chairs invite proposals for the 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition which is to be held in Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. Workshops can be half- or full-day, and it is also possible to hold workshops that will be operated in a virtual format but it is expected that most workshops will take place at the same venue as the main conference.
We seek Workshops on timely topics and applications of Computer Vision, Image and Sound Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. Workshops are expected to provide a forum for the active exchange of ideas and experiences. Members from all segments of the ICPR community are invited to submit workshop proposals for review. Each proposal will be assessed for its scientific content, proposed structure and overall relevance. Workshop organizers will be responsible for inviting speakers and ensuring their participation, submission and review of papers, and structuring leading discussion sessions.

Guideline for submitting proposals

The workshop proposal should be submitted via email to the ICPR 2022 Workshop
Chairs at workshops@icpr2022.com by January 17th, 2022 (11:59PM Pacific Time).
You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt by email within a few working days.

Important Dates

  • Workshop proposals due January: 17, 2022
  • Workshop proposal decisions: February 14, 2022
  • Recommended workshop paper deadline: June 6, 2022
  • Early bird registration deadline: June 6, 2022
  • Conference: August 21-25, 2022
  • Tutorials/Workshops: August 21, 2022

Contacts

ICPR 2022 Workshop Co-Chairs:
● Jonathan Wu (Canada) – jwu@uwindsor.ca
● Laurence Likforman (France) – likforman@telecom-paristech.fr
● Giovanni Maria Farinella (Italy) – gfarinella@dmi.unict.it
● Xiang Bai (China) – xbai@hust.edu.cn

More details on PDF call for workshops.

Tutorials

The ICPR 2022 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials in conjunction with the 26 th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which is to be held at Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. We seek tutorials on core techniques, application areas and emerging research topics that are of interest within
the ICPR community. An effective and informative tutorial should provide a broad introduction to the chosen research area as well as in-depth coverage on selected advanced topics. Proposals that focus exclusively on the presenters’ own work or commercial presentations are not acceptable.

Guidelines for submitting proposals

To propose a tutorial, a PDF file containing the information outlined below must be
submitted by email to tutorials@icpr2022.com.

Important dates

Submission of proposals: March 14, 2022 [11:59 p.m. Central European Time ]
Notification of acceptance: April 11, 2022.
Early bird registration deadline: June 6, 2022
Conference: August 21-25, 2022
Tutorials/Workshops: August 21, 2022

More details on PDF call for tutorials.

Challenges

The ICPR 2022 Challenges Co-Chairs invites proposals for challenges to be held within the framework of the 26 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which is to be held at Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada during August 21-25, 2022. The aim of the challenges is to advance algorithm and method development in Pattern Recognition by objective evaluation on common datasets. The challenge organizers are responsible for providing good quality data and defining objective evaluation criteria that are applied to the results of submitted algorithms.

Submission

Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the ICPR Challenges Chairs:
Dimosthenis Karatzas (dimos@cvc.uab.es)
Marco Bertini (marco.bertini@unifi.it)

Important Dates

December 20, 2021: Submission of proposals for challenges.
January 10, 2022: Notification of acceptance.
May 20, 2022: Challenge report due
June 6, 2022: Camera ready report submission
June 6, 2022: Early bird conference registration deadline
August 21, 2022: Challenge presentation date

If you have any questions, please contact the ICPR2022 Challenges Chairs.

More details on PDF call for challenges.


7) Call for Papers ICPRAI 2022

Endorsed by IAPR

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021

Printed in LNCS proceedings volume

You are invited to submit a paper for the third International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (ICPRAI 2022). It will be held in PARIS 1st to 3rd June 2022

See at https://icprai2022.sciencesconf.org

At the moment in Paris (France), we cannot predict what will be sanitary situation next June. In this context, we cannot schedule for sure, how the conference will take place. We hope most of you can travel for an on site conference, but an hybrid version is also possible.

Scope of the Conference

The conference aims to bring together researchers, students and practitioners of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, to present and discuss new advances.

Pattern recognition : recognition of different types of patterns, feature extraction / selection and evaluation, structural / statistical approaches

Computer vision : image processing / analysis, segmentation, object recognition, scene understanding

Artificial intelligence : machine / deep learning, expert systems, system interpretability, knowledge representation, perception, semantic analysis, intelligent systems

Big data : data visualization, volume / velocity / data variety, small sample size, supercomputing, cloud, data mining and performance evaluation

With applications related to: handwriting, document, text, language processing, e-learning, image processing / analysis, bio-medical imaging, remote sensing, image retrieval, 2D / 3D images and graphics, audio / video, multimedia applications, security and forensic studies, mobile applications, face, fingerprint, iris, brain, strategic objects and targets, industrial applications of PRAI, innovation and technology transfer, financial trends and analysis, traffic analysis and smart transportation systems, robotics and autonomous vehicles …

With 5 special sessions

and

3 keynotes

A Special Issue is scheduled for the best papers in IJPRAI journal

As well as a Special Section of the Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier) journal.

Proposed by:

Honorary Chair          Ching Y. Suen (Canada)

General chair              Nicole Vincent (France) 

Conference Co-Chairs           Edwin Hancock (UK)

Yuan Y. Tang (China)

Program Chairs          Mounim El Yacoubi (France)

                        Umapada Pal (India)

                        Eric Granger (Canada)

                        Pong C. Yuen (China)

Key dates

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021

Author notification: 8/03/2022

Submissions

The conference solicits papers covering any of these topics. Papers will be 12 pages of content in the Springer LNCS style and should report on novel, unpublished work.

The proceedings of the conference will be published as a Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) proceedings volume.

Contact

icprai2022@sciencesconf.org

Sponsors are : IMDS , IDEMIA , LIPADE , Université de Paris faculté des Sciences


8) IJDAR article alert (vol. 24)

Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2021
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/24-3

Titles of the 10 articles:

Volume 24, Issue 4, December 2021
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/volumes-and-issues/24-4

Titles of the 5 articles:


9) Job offers – repost

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

Title: Combining Deep and Syntactical Models for a Self-adaptive Optical Music Recognition System applied on Historical Orchestra Scores

Pdf version

https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/files/2021/10/SujetInge_Collabscore.pdf

Important Dates

December 1, 2021 (or later) - July 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 self-adaptive 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, using the Isolating-GAN, a novel unsupervised music symbol detection method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN);
  • create a gradual mechanism for adapting the system to new partitions to build a self-adaptive system with few annotated data;
  • 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 (GAN, RCNN, SSD…), 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 digitized 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 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