Welcome to the August edition of the TC10 newsletter.
In few days will start our main event of the year, ICDAR 2024 in Athens, Greece. Six workshops including DAS and MANPU will be held on Friday and Saturday. Three tutorials will take place Sunday and the main conference will run from Monday to Wednesday, including four keynote speakers, orals and many competition and poster sessions. This year’s best young investigator award goes to… Dr. Vincent Christlein congratulations!
This issue also includes call for papers for the IJDAR journal track of ICDAR 2025 and the open call for organizing next DAR events.
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
Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC10 community, please consider joining the TC10 mailing list by clicking the join us button on the main page the website.
1) Upcoming deadlines and events
2024
Deadlines
Nov 15, ICDAR 2025 Journal track paper submission deadline
2) IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award – nomination
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
The IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award is presented biannually in even years. Recipients need to be less than 40 years old at the time the award is made.
The recipient of the award 2024 is:
Dr. Vincent Christlein, for outstanding contributions to handwriting recognition applied to forensics and historical documents.
Congratulations!
The award will be presented at ICDAR 2024, followed by a keynote speech of Dr. Christlein.
Jean-Christophe Burie and Andreas Fischer TC10 and TC11 Chairs
3) ICDAR 2024 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, ICDAR 2021, and ICDAR 2023. The tradition of having a Doctoral Consortium as a satelite event to the ICDAR main conference will further be continued at ICDAR 2024 in Athens, Greece.
The goal of the ICDAR 2024 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. Students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during the poster sessions of the main conference. In addition, a mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback.
Participation in the ICDAR 2024 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application by June 24, 2024. 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 2024 Doctoral Consortium will take place during the poster sessions of the main conference, i.e., on Monday, September 2, and Tuesday, September 3.
The patterns of global comics Neil Cohn (Tilburg University)
While sequential images are pervasive in society, from picture books to instruction manuals and storyboards, they appear most complex in comics around the world. Over the past two decades, an increasing focus on corpus analysis has begun to allow greater insights into how comics are structured and comprehended, across work blending manual and computational annotations. Here I will focus on the insights from two corpus projects: the Visual Language Research Corpus (360 comics, 9 countries, 48,000 panels) and the TINTIN Corpus (1,030 comics, 144 countries/territories, 76,000 panels). This analysis will highlight how the structures of comics change over time while interacting with the culture and languages of their authors, revealing distinctive “visual languages” that balance diverse and universal features, consistent with other linguistic systems.
Document Analysis System (DAS) will be organized as a satellite workshop in conjunction with ICDAR 2024. Join us at DAS 2024 to explore the cutting-edge of document analysis technologies! This workshop is an unparalleled opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and technology enthusiasts to engage in a forward-looking discourse on document analysis systems’ evolution and future directions.
For more details, please have a look at the following link
ICDAR is the premier event for scientists and practitioners involved with document analysis and recognition, a field of growing importance in our current age of digital transition. The 19th edition of this flagship conference will beheld in Wuhan, September 17-21, 2025.
Conference Paper Submissions
There is both a standard conference paper track and a journal track at ICDAR 2025; details regarding the journal track maybe found in a separate Call for Papers.
Reviewing for conference papers will be double blind. Authors should not include their names, affiliations, or acknowledgements in submitted manuscripts, and should ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their earlier work in the third person.
Papers maybe up to 15 pages long (including references) in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format. Detailed submission instructions for authors can be found on the conference website (https://www.icdar2025.com/home).
Important Dates
Feb 7, 2025: Conference Title & Abstract submission deadline Feb 21, 2025: Conference full paper upload and editing closed Apr 11, 2025: Conference reviews due Apr 18, 2025: Conference rebuttal due Apr 25, 2025: Conference paper acceptance notation May 16, 2025: Camera-Ready and final notation
Publication: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
The conference proceedings will be published as part of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Accepted papers will be freely available through SpringerLink from the conference website for one year after publication, and will later be freely available through SpringerLink four years after publication.
Contact:
Xu-Cheng Yin <xuchengyin@ustb.edu.cn> Dimosthenis Karatzas <dimos@cvc.uab.es> Daniel Lopresti <lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu>
pc-chairs@icdar2025.org
7) 2025 ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track – Call for Paper
Following a feature of ICDAR2019 through ICDAR2024, ICDAR 2025 will again include the option of a journal track that offers the rapid turnaround and dissemination times of a conference while providing the paper length, scientific rigor, and careful review process of an archival journal.
The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions that present original work in the areas of Document Analysis and Recognition appropriate to both the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR). Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR and will receive an oral presentation slot at the ICDAR 2025 conference.
Authors who submit their work to the journal track commit themselves to present their results at the ICDAR conference in case of acceptance. Springer Nature, the publisher of IJDAR, will make the papers accepted for the journal track freely available in a time frame of four weeks around the conference, beyond being available in the archival journal.
Nov 15, 2024: Journal track paper submission deadline
Jan 10, 2025: Initial journal track decision announced
Mar 14, 2025: Journal track paper revise submission deadline
May 23, 2025: Final notification
IJDAR Journal Track Submission Guidelines: Authors should submit their papers via the ICDAR 2025 collection on the IJDAR website. Please choose ICDAR 2025 from the collection dropdown on the “Details” page of the submission process. Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Special Issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least three independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process. Manuscripts will be subject to a peer reviewing process and must conform to the author guide lines available on the IJDAR website.
Publication: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science The conference proceedings will be published as part of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Accepted papers will be freely available through SpringerLink from the conference website for one year after publication, and will later be freely available through SpringerLink four years after publication.
8) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events
The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference.
In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events:
ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in 2028)
DAS: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in 2026)
GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (biannually in odd years; next possibility in 2025, see call for proposal in section 9 of this newsletter).
Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10) Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
9) IJDAR article alert (vol. 27, issue 2)
Volume 27, issue 2, June 2024. Please find below the 6 articles:
For internship, please find an updated list maintained by IAPR of 38 companies with locations (some remote), requirements, etc.: https://iapr.org/about-us/internships/
PhD Positions Available (Fall 2024 or Spring 2025)
Document and Pattern Recognition Lab, RIT, USA
Area: Graphics-Oriented and Multi-Modal Information Retrieval and Information Extraction
Currently we are looking to recruit 2 PhD students to start their PhD as members of the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in the CS Department in Fall 2024. The focus of our work is on recognizing and retrieving information in document, images, and videos, with an emphasis on graphical notations (e.g., math and chemistry).
An overview of some projects from the lab may be found online here. Former PhD students from the dprl work in a variety of industrial research positions (e.g., at Apple in the bay area) and as professors at universities (e.g., at DePaul University in Chicago, and the University of Southern Maine).
Have a look at the demonstrations, papers, dissertations, and theses published out of the lab.
· PhD applicants must hold or soon be completing a BSc or MSc in Computer Science (with foundations in theory, algorithms, and implementation). · To apply, send your CV/resume along with a brief research proposal sketch (1-2 pages) that includes:
a specific research question,
how this is related to previous work in the dprl, and
a short sketch of how you would go about addressing the question
Note: You will not be committed to work proposed, this is for application purposes only.
· If your background and materials are a fit for the lab, I will email to set up two interviews over Zoom: the first for discussion, and the second as a technical interview
If you wish to apply or have any questions about the available positions, please do not hesitate to email me at rxzvcs@rit.edu. If you think you may be interested, please contact me soon, the deadline for formal applications to the program is in early-to-mid January of 2024.
Welcome to the March edition of the TC10 newsletter.
In this issue you’ll find ICDAR 2024 satellite workshop (DAS, MANPU) and several competition announcements, ICPR 2024 deadline extension, IJDAR paper alert and a special issue at Multimedia Tools and Applications: Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age. There are also several approaching deadlines listed in the first section.
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
Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC10 community, please consider joining the TC10 mailing list by clicking the join us button on the main page the website.
1) Upcoming deadlines and events
2024
Deadlines
March 20 April 10, paper submission deadline, ICPR 2024, Kolkata, India – extended
March 31, workshop proposal deadline for ICPR 2024
March 31, deadline of the IAPR Fellow Awards Call for Nominations
April 5,proposal submission for hosting SSDA 2025
April 15, paper submission deadline for special issue: Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age – extended
April 23, abstract submission deadline MANPU 2024 – extended
For example, the detection and recognition of the characters in a comics page are not trivial since the main character can be a human being, an animal, or even an imaginary character. In this context, the “pattern recognition” task is a tricky problem. Comics analysis has aroused interest among researchers. The number of scientific papers dealing with comics analysis has significantly increased in international conferences and journals during the last ten years.
Important Dates
Title and abstract submission due:
April 23rd, 2024
Paper submission due:
April 30th, 2024
Notification of acceptance:
May 27th, 2024
Camera-ready paper due:
June 10th, 2024
Workshop:
August 30th, 2024
Scope and Topics
The scope of this workshop includes, but is not limited to,
Comics Image Processing
Comics Analysis and Understanding
Comics Recognition
Comics Retrieval and Spotting
Comics Enrichment
Born-digital comics
Reading Behavior Analysis of Comics
Comics Generation
Copy protection – Fraud detection
Physical/Digital Comics Interfaces
Cognitive Processing and Comprehension of Comics
Linguistics Analysis of Comics
Datasets
To evaluate the proposed works, participants will be able to use the following datasets that are publicly available. Researchers can request to download them at each website.
eBDtheque consists of 100 images with ground truth for panels, speech balloons, tails, text lines, leading characters. website: http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr/
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 2024 will follow a single-blind review process. The accepted papers will be published in the “ICDAR pre-conference volume” edited by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
Paper format and length.
Papers should be formatted with the style files/details available at Information for Authors of Springer Computer Science Proceedings. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded here. It is also available on Overleaf. Only PDF files are accepted. A complete paper should be submitted in the proper format. Papers accepted for the workshop will be allocated up to 15 pages (usually not counting references) in the proceedings. Submissions are expected to be in the range of 10-15 pages.
General Co-Chairs, Jean-Christophe Burie University of La Rochelle, France Motoi Iwata Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan Yusuke Matsui The University of Tokyo, Japan
Document Analysis System (DAS) will be organized as a satellite workshop in conjunction with ICDAR 2024. Join us at DAS 2024 to explore the cutting-edge of document analysis technologies! This workshop is an unparalleled opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and technology enthusiasts to engage in a forward-looking discourse on document analysis systems’ evolution and future directions.
We welcome papers and demos in the following categories according to Springer formatting guidelines.
Full papers (12-15 pages) for comprehensive research findings,
Short papers (6-8 pages) for research in progress, and novel ideas
Demos. Must be accompanied by a short paper (6-8 pages)
Demos for Accepted ICDAR papers(4-8 pages) highlighting the application and technical detail of the accepted paper.
Important Dates
Full Paper submission: April 29, 2024 Full Paper Acceptance notification: May 27, 2024 Full Papers Camera-ready: June 07, 2024 Short Papers/Demos Submission: June 03, 2024 Short Papers/Demos Acceptance Notification: June 10, 2024 Short Papers Camera-ready: June 17, 2024
For more details, please have a look at the following link
We are looking forward to your excellent contributions!
DAS Organizing Committee
4) Call for Nominations for the 2024 IAPR Fellow Awards – repost
Deadline: March 31, 2024
Full 2024 Nomination Instructions can be found here (.docx)
To initiate a nomination, a nominator must complete and submit an IAPR Fellow Nomination Form. Any member of an IAPR Member Society can serve as nominator, except for the nominee themself and the current members of the Executive and Fellow Committees.
Each nomination must be endorsed by at least one recommendation letter (submitted endorsement form), either from a member of an IAPR Member Society (different from the nominator) or from an IAPR Fellow.
All electronic documents (Nomination and Endorsement forms) must be submitted electronically and will be acknowledged by an email. Submission problems should be reported to the IAPR Webmaster, cc’ing the Fellow Committee Chair, Prof. Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India:
IAPR appreciates your efforts to support our fellowship program!
5) ICDAR 2024 Occluded RoadText Competition
The Occluded RoadText challenge is designed to evaluate and advance existing methodologies in scene text detection and recognition, specifically under conditions of partial occlusion.
The challenge introduces a new dataset featuring real-world traffic scenes with natural objects obscuring parts of the text. Participants will need to develop methods that can decipher partially visible text and leverage the context of the entire image, including other visible texts, objects and supplementary images.
The challenge contains three different tasks – 1. Text Localization, 2. Single Image End-to-End Recognition, and 3. Multi Image End-to-End Recognition
* 15th January 2024: Competition Announced * 19th February 2024: Validation data released * 5th March 2024: Test data release * 20th March 2024: Submission site opens * 10th May 2024: Deadline for competition submissions
All deadlines are in the AoE time zone.
Organizers
* George Tom, Minesh Mathew, Ajoy Mondal, C. V. Jawahar – CVIT, IIIT Hyderabad * Jerod Weinman – Grinnell College * Dimosthenis Karatzas – Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
6) ICDAR 2024 Competition on Handwriting Recognition of Historical Ciphers
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low resource scenarios (i.e. when the amount of labeled data is scarce) is a challenging problem. This is particularly the case of historical encrypted manuscripts, so called ciphers, which contain secret messages, and were typically used in military or diplomatic correspondence, records of secret societies, or private letters. In order to hide their contents, the sender and receiver created their own secret method of writing. The cipher alphabets oftentimes include digits, Latin or Greek letters, Zodiac and alchemical signs combined with various diacritics, as well as invented ones. The first step in the decryption process is the transcription of these manuscripts which is not easy due to the great variation of hand-writing styles, and cipher alphabets with a few number of pages. Although different strategies can be considered to deal with the insufficient amount of training data (e.g. few-shot learning, self-supervised learning) the performance of available HTR models is not yet satisfactory. Thus, we believe that a competition with a large number of symbol sets and scribes can boost the research of HTR in low resource scenarios.
Dates:
18 February 2024: test data released
10 May 2024: submission of results (extended deadline)
7) ICDAR 2024 Competition on Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking
Call for Participation
Dear colleagues,
The deadline for final submission has been extended to April 15th, so you still have a month left to register for and participate in the ICDAR 2024 Competition on Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking! If you are at the forefront of text detection and recognition, we invite you to join us: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=28
Please also note that we are now accepting submissions for the final test set.
This competition aims to tackle the unique challenges of detecting and recognizing textual information (e.g., place names) and linking words to create location phrases from scanned historical map images.
Training, validation and test sets are already available, along with evaluation tools. Follow us on Twitter (@ICDAR24_MapText) to stay updated with the latest news!
The competition is organized by seasoned competition organizers from the following institutions: University of Minnesota (USA), Grinnell College (USA), Univ Gustave Eiffel, ENSG, IGN, LASTIG (France), EHESS (France), EPITA (France).
We look forward to seeing your innovative solutions in action!
— ICDAR 2024 MapText Organizers
8) SSDA 2025: Call for proposal for the next summer school on document analysis – repost
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 India, France, Pakistan, Sweden, and Switzerland, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the sixth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2025.
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 2025 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas and Africa are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School.
In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarize themselves with the guidelines for organizing the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site or click here.
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 Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative).
Previous events:
As a reference, the 2023 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Fribourg, Switzerland (URL: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/ )
9) ICPR 2024 call for paper – extended
Greetings from the ICPR-2024 organizing committee!
The International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) is the flagship conference of the International Association of Pattern Recognition and the premier conference in Pattern Recognition, covering Computer Vision, Machine learning, Image, Speech, Sensor pattern processing etc.
ICPR-2024 is the 27th event of the series which will be held at Kolkata, India during December 1-5, 2024 and ICPR-2024 will be celebrating 50years of ICPR.
Paper submission deadline of ICPR-2024 is extended upto April 10, 2024. Organizing committee invites prospective researchers to submit papers, workshop proposals, tutorial proposals, competition proposals, etc. Information about the calls for Papers/Workshops/Tutorials/Competitions are available at the ICPR-2024 website:
The deadlines for the different calls are as follows:
· Paper submission deadline: April 10, 2024 (extended) · Competition Proposal submission deadline: March 31, 2024 · Workshop proposal submission deadline: March 31, 2024 · Tutorial proposal submission deadline: June 15, 2024
Submission and Review:
ICPR-2024 will follow a single-blind review process. Authors can include their names and affiliations in the manuscript.
Paper Format and Length:
Springer LNCS format with maximum 15 pages (including references) during paper submission. To take care of reviewers’ comments, one more page is allowed (without any charge) during revised/camera ready submission. Moreover, authors may purchase up to 2 extra pages.
Springer LNCS paper formatting instructions and templates for ICPR-2024 are available in the ICPR-2024 website (https://icpr2024.org/for-papers.html)
Please visit the ICPR-2024 website icpr2024.org for more details.
We look forward to your participation in ICPR-2024.
With regards,
Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA (ICPR-2024 General Chairs)
Rama Chellappa, Johns Hopkins University, USA Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, UK Cheng-Lin Liu, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Subhasis Chaudhuri, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India (ICPR-2024 Program Chairs)
10) International Computer Vision Summer School
**Computer Vision in the Age of Large Language Models**
The eighteenth edition of the International Computer Vision Summer School aims to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in Computer Vision. The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of computer vision and machine learning. The next decade will see machine perception in embodied systems which learn representations for and from action and interaction.
The courses will be delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry, and will cover both theoretical and practical aspects of real Computer Vision problems as well as examples of their successful commercialization.
The school aims to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and Ph.D. students. The participants will benefit from direct interaction and discussions with world leaders in Computer Vision. Participants will also have the possibility to present the results of their research, and to interact with their scientific peers, in a friendly and constructive environment.
• Roberto Cipolla, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Sebastiano Battiato, University of Catania, Italy
• Giovanni Maria Farinella, University of Catania, Italy
*SPECIAL SESSION – Industry meets Student*
In addition to the academic programme, we are organizing a special session to allow students to meet and learn about the opportunities and activities at the world leading research laboratories and companies which are exploiting computer vision.
11) Call for papers Special Issue: Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age
Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age: Advances in machine learning, monomodal and multimodal processing, and human-machine interaction
Special issue at Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer
Deadline: April 15, 2024
https://link.springer.com/journal/11042/updates/26502650
Aims and Scope
This special issue focuses on analyzing, processing and valorizing all types of data related to cultural heritage, including tangible and intangible heritage. As stated by UNESCO, cultural heritage provides societies with a wealth of resources inherited from the past, created in the present for the benefit of future generations. The massive digitization of historical analogue resources and production of born digital documents provide us with large volumes of varied multimedia heritage data (images, maps, text, video, 3D objects, multi-sensor data, etc.), which represent an extremely rich heritage that can be exploited in a wide variety of fields, from research in social sciences and computational humanities to land use and territorial policies, including urban modeling, digital simulation, archaeology, tourism, education, culture preservation, creative media and entertainment.
In terms of research in computer science, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities, they address challenging problems related to the diversity, specificity or volume of the media, the veracity of the data, and the different user needs with respect to engaging with this rich material and the extraction of value out of the data. These challenges are reflected in the corresponding sub-fields of machine learning, signal processing, mono/multi-modal techniques and human-machine interaction.
The objective of this special issue is to present and discuss the latest and most significant trends on analysis, understanding and promotion of heritage contents, focusing on advances on machine learning, signal processing, mono/multi-modal techniques, and human-machine interaction. We welcome research contributions for (but not limited to) the following topics:
Monomodal analysis: image, text, video, 3D, music, sensor data and structured referentials
Information retrieval for multimedia heritage
AI assisted archaeology and heritage data processing
Multi-modal deep learning and time series analysis for heritage data
Heritage modeling, visualization, and virtualization
Smart digitization and reconstruction of heritage data
Open heritage data and bench-marking
The scope of targeted applications is extensive and includes:
Analysis, archaeometry of artifacts
Diagnosis and monitoring for restoration and preventive conservation
Geosciences / Geomatics for cultural heritage
Education
Smart and sustainable tourism
Urban planning
Digital Twins
Important Dates
Submission deadline: 31 March 2024 —> 15 April 2024
Review period: 16 April – 30 July 2024
Notification: 31 July 2024
Author revision deadline: 15 October 2024
Final notification: 31 October 2024
Guest Editors
Valerie Gouet-Brunet, IGN-ENSG, University of Gustave Eiffel, France (valerie.gouet@ign.fr)
Ronak Kosti, Piscsart AI Lab, Germany (ronakfau@gmail.com)
Li Weng, School of Information Technology, Zhejiang Financial College, China (lweng@zfc.edu.cn)
Submission Guidelines
Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the Multimedia Tools and Applications website. Authors should submit through the online submission site at https://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap/default.aspx and select “SI 1250- Heritage Preservation in the Digital Age: Advances in machine learning, monomodal and multimodal processing, and human-machine interaction” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.
SUMAC 2023. Please note that the authors of selected papers presented at workshop SUMAC2023 (ACM Multimedia 2023) are invited to submit an extended version of their contributions by taking into consideration both the reviewers’ comments on their conference paper, and the feedback received during presentation at the conference.
12) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events
The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference.
In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events:
ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in 2027)
DAS: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in 2026)
GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (biannually in odd years; next possibility in 2025, see call for proposal in section 9 of this newsletter).
Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10) Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11
13) IJDAR article alert (vol. 27, issue 1)
Volume 27, issue 1, March 2024. Please find below the 7 articles:
For internship, please find an updated list maintained by IAPR of 38 companies with locations (some remote), requirements, etc.: https://iapr.org/about-us/internships/
PhD Positions Available (Fall 2024 or Spring 2025)
Document and Pattern Recognition Lab, RIT, USA
Area: Graphics-Oriented and Multi-Modal Information Retrieval and Information Extraction
Currently we are looking to recruit 2 PhD students to start their PhD as members of the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in the CS Department in Fall 2024. The focus of our work is on recognizing and retrieving information in document, images, and videos, with an emphasis on graphical notations (e.g., math and chemistry).
An overview of some projects from the lab may be found online here. Former PhD students from the dprl work in a variety of industrial research positions (e.g., at Apple in the bay area) and as professors at universities (e.g., at DePaul University in Chicago, and the University of Southern Maine).
Have a look at the demonstrations, papers, dissertations, and theses published out of the lab.
· PhD applicants must hold or soon be completing a BSc or MSc in Computer Science (with foundations in theory, algorithms, and implementation). · To apply, send your CV/resume along with a brief research proposal sketch (1-2 pages) that includes:
a specific research question,
how this is related to previous work in the dprl, and
a short sketch of how you would go about addressing the question
Note: You will not be committed to work proposed, this is for application purposes only.
· If your background and materials are a fit for the lab, I will email to set up two interviews over Zoom: the first for discussion, and the second as a technical interview
If you wish to apply or have any questions about the available positions, please do not hesitate to email me at rxzvcs@rit.edu. If you think you may be interested, please contact me soon, the deadline for formal applications to the program is in early-to-mid January of 2024. Richard Zanibbi.
Welcome to the November edition of the TC10 newsletter.
In this issue, you will find a welcome message for the new educational officer and dataset curator, several calls and reports regarding past and next ICDAR conferences, SSDA summer school and also next ICPR and DAS editions. Along with two calls for nomination from the IAPR association, the editorial of the special Issue: “Advanced Topics in Document Analysis and Recognition” (14 articles) and finally, please find the summary of the last IJDAR issue and a two job offers.
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:
November 14, paper submission firm deadline, Journal-First track of ICDAR 2024
November 30, proposal submission for hosting DAS 2024
December 15, nominations due for the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award
Events:
2024 and later
Deadlines
January 20, paper submission deadline, ICPR 2024, Kolkata, India
January 31, proposal submission for hosting ICDAR 2027
April 5,proposal submission for hosting SSDA 2025
March 31, deadline of the IAPR Fellow Awards Call for Nominations
Events:
February 27-29, conference VISAPP, Rome, Italy
August 30-4 sep., conference ICDAR 2024, Athens, Greece
December 1-5,conference ICPR 2024, Kolkata, India
2) Welcome to the new TC10 educational officer and dataset curator
The TC10 Committee is delighted to welcome two new members in the team : Momina Moetesum as Educational Officer and Sanket Biwas as Dataset Curator.
Welcome to the TC10 committee.
Jean-Christophe Burie
Sanket Biwas is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Vision Center (CVC), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Momina Moetesum is an Assistant Professor in Faculty of Computing at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan.
3) Call for Nominations for the 2024 IAPR Fellow Awards
Deadline: March 31, 2024
Full 2024 Nomination Instructions can be found here (.docx)
To initiate a nomination, a nominator must complete and submit an IAPR Fellow Nomination Form. Any member of an IAPR Member Society can serve as nominator, except for the nominee themself and the current members of the Executive and Fellow Committees.
Each nomination must be endorsed by at least one recommendation letter (submitted endorsement form), either from a member of an IAPR Member Society (different from the nominator) or from an IAPR Fellow.
All electronic documents (Nomination and Endorsement forms) must be submitted electronically and will be acknowledged by an email. Submission problems should be reported to the IAPR Webmaster, cc’ing the Fellow Committee Chair, Prof. Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India:
IAPR appreciates your efforts to support our fellowship program!
4) Call for Nominations for the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award
Nominations Due: December 15, 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 2024, nominations are invited for the following award category:
IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator 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 2024 conference, introduced by the previous recipient of the award.
The nomination pack should include the following:
A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
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 December 15, 2023 but early submissions are strongly encouraged.
5) ICDAR 2023: ScalDoc workshop report
The ICDAR 2023 workshop on Scaling-up Document Image Understanding aimed at opening the discussion on possible ways to widen our community through the use of data preparation efforts and the definition of large-scale (grand) challenges that drive progress in the field. Fruitful discussions led to the creation of a Slack channel to gather academic and industrial researchers willing to collaborate on the creation of a “dataset of datasets”.
This effort should enable the training and evaluation of new foundation models for document understanding.
A first meeting have been scheduled on Wed. 2023-09-13, at 19:00 UTC+2 Don’t hesitate and join us, we are already more than 20! Slack invitation: https://bit.ly/datasetofdatasets
6) ICDAR 2024: Journal-first Track Call for Papers and Reviewers
Following a feature of ICDAR2019 through ICDAR2023, ICDAR 2024 will again include the option of a journal track that offers the rapid turnaround and dissemination times of a conference while providing the paper length, scientific rigor, and careful review process of an archival journal.
The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions that present original work in the areas of Document Analysis and Recognition appropriate to both the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR). Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR and will receive an oral presentation slot at the ICDAR 2024 conference.
Submissions Due: November 14, 2023 (firm deadline)
Note that the deadline has been moved to 14 November 2023 because of the delay in opening this site. Please check the above website for further submission details and important dates.
We would like to encourage anyone interested in doing reviews for this interesting journal track to contact Prof. Elisa Barney elisa.barney@ltu.se.
7) ICDAR 2024 Call for Tutorials
Call for Tutorials for ICDAR 2024
The ICDAR 2024 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials that will be held on August 30th to September 4th (the correct final date will be communicated as soon as possible), before the main conference begins.
Important Dates
Proposals Due: Nov. 30, 2023 Acceptance Notification: Dec. 23, 2023 Dates of Tutorials: Aug. 30 – Sep. 4, 2024
ICDAR 2024 Tutorials should serve one or more of the following objectives:
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: – Alicia Fornes afornes@cvc.uab.es – Vincent Christlein vincent.christlein@fau.de
Feedback, comments and/or suggestions would be provided within two weeks of receiving the proposal. Final acceptance (or rejection) would be decided by December 23, 2023. Inquiries should be sent to tutorials-chairs@icdar2024.net or the above emails.
8) SSDA 2023: Report of the last summer school on document analysis
We are happy to announce that the 5th IAPR TC10/TC11 summer school on document analysis was a great success! It took place from July 3 to 7, 2023 in Fribourg and Moléson, Switzerland. 21 PhDs and young researchers from 8 different countries benefited from high-quality lectures by experts in the field:
• Apostolos Antonacopoulos, University of Salford, United Kingdom, Large-scale Recognition of Information-rich Documents: From Unreadable Data to Structured Information • Jean-Christophe Burie, University of La Rochelle, France, Analysis and understanding of comics: From the detection of basic elements to the creation of semantic links with classic and deep learning-based approaches. • Gernot Fink, TU Dortmund University, Germany, Deep Learning for Word Spotting: Foundations and Current Developments. • Andreas Fischer, University of Fribourg and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Structural methods for document analysis and recognition: From rule-based models to data-driven deep learning. • Alicia Fornes, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and CVC, Spain, Handwriting Recognition in Low Resource Scenarios. • C.V. Jawahar, Towards a deeper understanding of documents, III-T Hyderabad, India. • Koichi Kise, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan, Reading of Reading for Actuating: Augmenting Human Learning by Experiential Supplements. • Rich Kent, CTO of Taina, UK, You can’t hide from tax anymore!, A real world example of how one company has used document analysis and recognition to change the tax industry
Alongside the courses, participants were able to actively take part during a pitch and a poster session. A handwriting recognition competition was also held. Many social activities, scientific exchanges and campfires were organized, helping to create and/or strengthen links between participants.
Congratulations to Marco Peers, TU Vienna, who won the best poster award and the prize for excellence.
Finally, we would like to thank all the organizers and sponsors who made this event possible. Special thanks to IAPR for funding 4 grants and reducing accommodation costs for students to DIVA, DIUF, Centenary Fund from University of Fribourg and HEIA for their financial and administrative contributions. Thank you to the speakers for your time and knowledge sharing.
See you soon for the 6th edition!
Anna Scius-Bertrand, SSDA 23 organizing committee.
9) SSDA 2025: Call for proposal for the next summer school on document analysis
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 India, France, Pakistan, Sweden, and Switzerland, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the sixth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2025.
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 2025 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas and Africa are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School.
In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarize themselves with the guidelines for organizing the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site or click here.
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 Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative).
Previous events:
As a reference, the 2023 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Fribourg, Switzerland (URL: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/ )
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.
We are looking forward to receiving high quality proposals and making the first chapter of DAS-ICDAR 2024 a big success!
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10) Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
11) ICPR 2024: Call for Papers
Greetings from the ICPR-2024 organizing committee.
The International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) is the flagship conference of the International Association of Pattern Recognition and the premier conference in Pattern Recognition, covering Computer Vision, Machine learning, Image, Speech, Sensor Pattern Processing etc. ICPR-2024 is the 27th event of the series which will be held at Kolkata, India during December 1-5, 2024. This conference provides a great opportunity to nurture new ideas and collaborations for students, academics, and industry researchers. ICPR-2024 will cover the following six tracks:
– Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
– Computer and Robot Vision
– Image, Speech, Signal and Video Processing
– Biometrics and Human Computer Interaction
– Document Analysis and Recognition
-Biomedical Imaging and Bioinformatics
The main conference has several highlights, including keynotes by top experts, invited talks by academic and industry professionals, oral paper presentation, poster paper presentation, etc. ICPR-2024 will also have many workshops and Tutorials.
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers.
Important deadlines:
Paper submission open: January 20, 2024 Paper submission deadline: March 20, 2024 Reviews sent to authors (Acceptance/rejection/Revision): June 20, 2024 Revision/rebuttal submission deadline: July 10, 2024 Final Acceptance notification: August 5, 2024 Camera-ready submission: August 31, 2024
Submission and Review:
ICPR-2024 will follow a single-blind review process. Authors can include their names and affiliations in the manuscript.
Paper Format and Length:
Springer LNCS format with maximum 15 pages (including references) during paper submission. To take care of reviewers’ comments, one more page is allowed (without any charge) during revised/camera ready submission. Moreover, authors may purchase up to 2 extra pages.
Springer LNCS paper formatting instructions and templates for ICPR-2024 are available in the icpr2024 website (https://icpr2024.org/cfp.html)
The PDF version of the CFP has been attached for your kind reference. Please visit the ICPR-2024 website icpr2024.org for more details.
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 21st International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in 2027 (ICDAR 2027).
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.
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.
The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference.
In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events:
ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in 2027)
DAS: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in 2024)
GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (biannually in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10) Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
14) Special Issue: “Advanced Topics in Document Analysis and Recognition”
Editorial from Koichi Kise, Richard Zanibbi, Rajiv Jain & Gernot A. Fink:
The ongoing advancement of deep learning techniques, such as the Transformer and Large Language Models, continues to enhance both the accuracy and efficiency of methods in the field of Document Analysis and Recognition, while also broadening its scope. The primary objective of this Special Issue is to keep pace with these developments and showcase the latest advancements in document analysis and recognition. Upholding our tradition established for journal track papers from the ICDAR conference with issues released in 2019 and 2021, we present the third edition of the Special Issue, under the same title.
Despite the persistent effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a call for papers, disseminating this widely through the web pages of IJDAR and ICDAR. By November 2022, we received 33 submissions that were deemed relevant to the scope of our work. Each submission was assigned to one of ourselves as guest editor, with careful attention paid to avoiding any conflicts of interest. We procured reviews from experts in the field, adhering to the journal’s standard practices. After a rigorous review process, often involving two or three rounds, we accepted 13 papers for publication in this special issue. These papers reflect both the breadth and depth of current research in the field of Document Analysis and Recognition.
The accepted papers can be grouped into several categories: document image processing and classification (two papers), historical document analysis (four papers), character recognition (one paper), online handwriting analysis (two papers), layout analysis (two papers), and applications (two papers). We will briefly summarize the accepted papers in… See more
15) IJDAR article alert (vol. 26, issue 4)
Volume 26, issue 4, December 2023. Please find below the 5 articles:
Post-doctoral position 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, one focused on FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY and another in COMPUTER VISION.
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)
Deep Learning, Vision, OCR, Document Understanding, Natural language processing
Context and main objectives
The digital transformation of libraries, which has been based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology for more than 20 years, faces some limitations both in terms of quality, due to the diversity of the collections and the limitations of OCR technology, and in terms of added value due to a lack of structuring and high-level indexing. Named entity extraction is still little used because it relies on language processing technologies, which were not very adaptable until recently. More generally, the semantic indexing of collections is underdeveloped and integrated with metadata. We propose to develop multimodal models (text + image) for the extraction of information from collections of digitized documents in large libraries. The literature shows that work in this direction is still underdeveloped, and that it is mainly aimed at processing commercial documents (invoices etc…).
The proposed project aims to disrupt the traditional sequential document processing workflow by combining Vision models and Large Language Models (LLM) to provide a more streamlined and efficient approach. The standard two-stages architectures based on OCR + NER (Optical Character Recognition, Named Entity Recognition) are now giving way to end-to-end multimodal approaches known as Document Understanding, which are more versatile and easily adaptable to new corpora, making it easier and more cost-effective to set up and run document processing projects. As a result, this accessible, user-friendly approach will democratize access to advanced AI technologies for a wider range of institutions, contributing to the evolution of the technology value chain in the Libraries, Archives and Museums (LAM) sector and opening up new opportunities for research and discovery.
The proposed work program funded by the FINLAM project (Foundation INtegrated models for Libraries Archives and Museum, ANR 2023), relies on the expertise of LITIS to study the most relevant multimodal architectures to integrate the language knowledge conveyed by the large language models developed recently and to study the modalities of specialization/adaptation of these models in conjunction with the learning of a generic optical encoder, benefiting from the annotated collections available at the French national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France – BnF). User interaction will be considered according to different scenarii of closed and open queries.
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.
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
August 21-23, conferenceICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
August 24, doctoral consortium of ICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
August 24, workshopGREC 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.
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:
A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
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.
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.
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.
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
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):
Andreas Fischer, University of Fribourg and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland
Alicia Fornès, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
C.V. Jawahar, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India
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.
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.
8) 27th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries
Dates: 26-29 September 2023
Fullpaper deadline: 5 June 2023 - extended
Shortpaper 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
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)
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.
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 dueSSDA2023 – extended
April 17/24, abstract/full paper submission deadlineGREC 2023
Events:
August 21-23, 2023, conferenceICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
August 24-26, 2023, workshops, tutorials, and doctoral consortium of ICDAR 2023
August 25, workshopGREC 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)
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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).
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 dueICDAR 2023
January 15, paper submission deadlineICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
Events:
August 21-26, 2023, conferenceICDAR 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.
Title
Preference for the duration (full day or half day) and date (August 24, 25 and/or 26, 2023)
Scope and motivation
Topics
Relevance for ICDAR
Potential committee
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
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:
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)
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)
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).
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:
October 28,competition proposition deadlineICDAR 2023
October 16-19, conferenceICIP 2022, Bordeaux, France
October 23-27, conferenceECCV 2022, Tel Aviv, Israël
December4-7,conferenceICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India
2023 and later
Deadlines:
January 15, paper submission deadlineICDAR 2023, San José, California, USA
Events:
August 2023, conferenceICDAR 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:
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:
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
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
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 issueofPattern 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.
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 submissiondeadlineICFHR 2022
May 31, workshop & tutorial proposaldeadlineICFHR 2022
🎟️ 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)
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 13June 6, 2022
Notification of acceptance: May 31June 30, 2022
Camera-ready paper due: June 6September 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/
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
• 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
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.
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.
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 positionsin France.
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
August 21, workshop MANPU 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
August 21-25, conferenceICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
October 16-19, conferenceICIP 2022, Bordeaux, France
December2022,conferenceICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India
2023 and later
Events:
August 2023, conferenceICDAR 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:
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.
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/
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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– extendedDAS 2022
January 10 17, paper registration deadline– extendedICPR 2022
January 17 24,workshop submission deadline –extendedICPR 2022
January 28,challenge submission deadline –extendedICPR 2022
January 31,paper submission deadline – extendedICPRAI 2022
February 1, doctoral consortium submission deadlineICPRAI 2022
August 21-25, conferenceICPR 2022, Montréal, Québec (QC), Canada
December2022,conferenceICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India
2023 and later
Events:
August 2023, conferenceICDAR 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.
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.
Paper registration deadline: January 15, 2022EXTENDED (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.
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.
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 January17th24th, 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
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
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 10February 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.
Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/202131/01/2022 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
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
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
Medical Applications of Pattern Recognition and AI
Analysis and learning of multi-variate, multi-temporal, multi-resolution and multi-source remote sensing data
Graphs for Pattern Recognition: Representations, Theory and Applications
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: 15/12/202131/01/2022 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.
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
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
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.
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.
