[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 148 – December 2021

Welcome to the December 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

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

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

Please take care,

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

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

2022 and later

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

2) ICDAR 2021 Proceedings: Foreword from the General Chairs

Online version: ICDAR 2021 Proceedings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


3) Call for Bids for ICDAR 2025

Deadline: February 28, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICDAR Advisory Board,

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


4) Online Course on “Literate Models for Vision”

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

WHERE: Online

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

See more on the website.

IMPORTANT DATES

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

SUBMISSION TYPES

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

Full papers

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

Short papers

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



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

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

Main conference

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

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

Important Dates

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

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

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

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

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

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

See PDF call for papers.

Workshops

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

Guideline for submitting proposals

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

Important Dates

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

Contacts

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

More details on PDF call for workshops.

Tutorials

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

Guidelines for submitting proposals

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

Important dates

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

More details on PDF call for tutorials.

Challenges

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

Submission

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

Important Dates

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

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

More details on PDF call for challenges.


7) Call for Papers ICPRAI 2022

Endorsed by IAPR

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021

Printed in LNCS proceedings volume

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

See at https://icprai2022.sciencesconf.org

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

Scope of the Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

With 5 special sessions

and

3 keynotes

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

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

Proposed by:

Honorary Chair          Ching Y. Suen (Canada)

General chair              Nicole Vincent (France) 

Conference Co-Chairs           Edwin Hancock (UK)

Yuan Y. Tang (China)

Program Chairs          Mounim El Yacoubi (France)

                        Umapada Pal (India)

                        Eric Granger (Canada)

                        Pong C. Yuen (China)

Key dates

Deadline for Paper submission: 15/12/2021

Author notification: 8/03/2022

Submissions

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

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

Contact

icprai2022@sciencesconf.org

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


8) IJDAR article alert (vol. 24)

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

Titles of the 10 articles:

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

Titles of the 5 articles:


9) Job offers – repost

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

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

Pdf version

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

Important Dates

December 1, 2021 (or later) - July 31, 2024  Contract period

IRISA – Intuidoc

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

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

Collabscore project

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

Position to be filled

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

Missions

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

  • define a grammatical description of musical notation, using the existing DMOS-PI method;
  • generate unsupervised data for training musical symbols recognizers, using the Isolating-GAN, a novel unsupervised music symbol detection method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN);
  • create a gradual mechanism for adapting the system to new partitions to build a self-adaptive system with few annotated data;
  • integrate anomaly detection into the system.

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

Applicant Requirements

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

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


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

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

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

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

Position Description

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

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

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

Qualifications

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

General Qualifications

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

Applications

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

Download PDF

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 147 – September 2021

Welcome to the September 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

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

Looking forward seeing you at ICDAR,
Please take care,

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Everyone is invited, and should participate!

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

Best regards,
The TC10 team.


3) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

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

2022 and later

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

4) ICDAR 2021 News

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

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

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

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

Best regards,

Andreas, Rolf, and Marcus

See webpage: ICDAR news


5) ICDAR 2021 Nomination Awards

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Christophe Burie and Faisal Shafait
TC10 and TC11 Chairs


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

Tuesday, September 7th – Lausanne

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

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

** Workshop format **

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

The workshop will have three parts:

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

** Call for flash talks **

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

See more on the website.

TOPICS AND TECHNOLOGIES

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

IMPORTANT DATES

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

GENERAL CHAIR

Jean-Marc Ogier, La Rochelle, France

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

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


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

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

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

Important Dates

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

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

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

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

IAPR Ethical Requirements for Authors

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

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

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

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


9) IJDAR article alert (vol. 24)

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

Titles of the 10 articles:

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

10) Job offers (1 new)

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

Title: Optical Music Recognition System for Historical Orchestra Scores

Pdf version

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

Important Dates

October 1, 2021 - May 31, 2024  Contract period

IRISA – Intuidoc

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

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

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

Position to be filled

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

Missions

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

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

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

Applicant Requirements

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

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


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

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

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

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

Position Description

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

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

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

Qualifications

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

General Qualifications

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

Applications

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

Download PDF

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 146 – June 2021

Welcome to the June 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

Take care,

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

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

2022 and later

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

2) Annual ICDAR voting results

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


3) IJDAR article alert

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


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

Digital Transformation in a Changing World

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

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

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

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

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


5) ICDAR 2021 Call for Nomination Awards (extended)

Nominations Due: April 30, June 21 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Topics of Interest

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

Important dates

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

Submission Information & Publication of Proceedings

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Topics

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

Important dates

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Futurs Fantastiques 2021 program committee,

Emmanuelle Bermes, PC chair

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

More on ai4lam: http://ai4lam.org

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


10) Job offers (1 new)

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

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

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

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

Position Description

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

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

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

Qualifications

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

General Qualifications

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

Applications

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

Download PDF

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 145 – April 2021

Welcome to the April 2021 edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

Please take care and keep safe.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Message from the TC10 Executive Committee

Dear TC10 members,

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

The new Executive Committee will be composed of:

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

Best regards,
The TC10 Executive Committee


2) Voting for Annual ICDAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


3) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

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

2022 and later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics

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

Guidelines for authors

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

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

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

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

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

Important dates

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

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

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


5) ICDAR 2021 Call for Nomination Awards

Nominations Due: April 30, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


6) ICDAR 2021 call for Doctoral Consortium

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

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

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

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

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

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

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

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

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

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

IMPORTANT DATES:

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

We are looking forward to your participation!

Nibal Nayef and Jean-Christophe Burie
Doctoral Consortium Chairs


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

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

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

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

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

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


[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 144 – December 2020

Welcome to the December edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

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

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Message from TC10 chair:

Dear all,

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

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

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

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

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


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2021

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

2022 and later

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

2) IJDAR article alert

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


3) Invitation to TC10/11 meeting at ICPR

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


5) ICDAR 2021 2nd call for paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for papers:

Important Dates

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

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

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

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


6) ICDAR 2021 call for tutorials (deadline extended)

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

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

Important dates:

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

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

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


7) ICDAR 2021 competition on Document Visual Question Answering

*** NEW DATASETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE ***

Dear Colleagues,

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

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

Overview

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

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

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

Tasks

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

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

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

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

Registration

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

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

Important Dates

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

Organizers

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


8) ICDAR 2021 competition on Historical Map Segmentation

Dear colleagues,

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

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

Why should you consider this competition ?

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

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

Twitter account: @ICDAR21_MapSeg

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

Tasks:

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

Schedule:

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

Best regards,

The organizers

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


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

Important Dates

January 31, 2021  Proposal Submission Deadline

Submit Proposals via email to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 related notice:

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

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

Previous events:

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


10) DAS 2022 call for bids

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

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

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

The submission deadline is March 31st, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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


11) Job offers (2 new)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 143 – October 2020

Welcome to the October edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

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

2021 and later

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

2) IJDAR article alert

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


3) ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track

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

Important Dates

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

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

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

Format

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

Procedure and deadlines

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

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

Inquiries

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

Editors

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

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


4) ICDAR2021 call for workshop

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

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

Notes

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

Proceedings

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

Important Dates

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

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


5) MANPU@ICPR 2020 workshop

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

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

Scope and Topics

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

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

Datasets

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

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

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

Important Dates

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

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


[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 142 – June 2020

Welcome to the June edition of the TC10 newsletter.

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

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

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

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

2021 and later

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

2) IJDAR article alert

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


3) ICDAR 2021 Call for paper

ICDAR 2021

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

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

Conference

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

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

Important Dates

Main Conference

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

Special Journal Track

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

Competitions

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

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

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

Submission and Review

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

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

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

See more…


4) ICPR 2020 conference (second round)

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

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

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

The ICPR2020 General Chairs

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

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

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

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

General Chairs
Rita Cucchiara, Alberto del Bimbo, Stan Sclaroff

See more…


5) ICDAR2021 competition

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

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

Important Dates

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

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

Proposal

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

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

The following rules shall apply to the accepted competition:

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

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

Submission Guidelines & Inquiries

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

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

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

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


6) Job offers (1 new)

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

Automatic classification of business documents

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

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

Description of the LabCom:

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

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

  • Document classification
  • Document search
  • Document fraud detection

Job description:

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

Candidate Profile:

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

  • Machine learning / classification
  • Image analysis
  • Pattern recognition

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

The candidate’s skills will include:

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

To apply:

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

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

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

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

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

Title: Detection and verification of visual security devices in documents

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

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

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

Position Description

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

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

Qualifications

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

General Qualifications

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

Applications

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

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

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

Title : Recognition of text with variable styles in comics books

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

Position description

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

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 141 – March 2020

Welcome to the March edition of the TC10 newsletter.

Due to coronavirus disease, many conferences and workshops have postponed their submission deadlines such as ICFHR, ICPR, and WTDD (CVPR workshop).

Also, some major events are postponed and/or relocated: DAS2020 will be held in Beijing instead of Wuhan and postponed to July, 2020. Similarly, ICPR 2020 is postponed to January, 2021.

This pandemic also affects the review process of the GREC-IJDAR special issue, please be patient.

Please take care and keep safe from COVID-19.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

  • Deadlines:
    • March 31, paper submission deadline for WTDDLE 2020 (extended)
    • April 10 paper submission deadline for ICFHR 2020 (extended)
    • April 15, first round paper submission deadline for ICPR 2020 (extended)
    • June 8, paper submission deadline for S+SSPR 2020
  • Events:
    • June 16-18, conference CVPR 2020, Seattle, Washington, USA
    • July, second round paper submission deadline for ICPR 2020
    • July, workshop DAS 2020, Beijing, China (new location & dates)
    • August 23-28, conference ECCV 2020, Glasgow, UK
    • September 7-10, conference ICFHR 2020, Dortmund, Germany
    • September 8-11, workshop S+SSPR 2020, Padua, Italy

2021 and later

  • January 10-15, 2021, conference ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy (new dates)
  • September 5-10, 2021 conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • December, 2022 conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) IJDAR article alert

Volume 23, Issue 1, March 2020
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/23/1


3) CVPR 2020 Workshop on Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era (WTDDLE)

June 15, 2020, USA
https://cvpr2020text.wordpress.com

Overview

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. As such, the analysis of written communication in images has been one of the oldest fields in computer vision. There are two major application domains for such methods: document understanding and scene text understanding. Document understanding goes over and above OCR, requiring layout analysis, handwritten text recognition, symbolic language interpretation etc., on anything from administrative and historical documents to mixed-type documents such as maps and diagrams. Understanding text in the wild, on the other hand, has already enabled applications such as image-based translation or autonomous navigation. In both cases, dealing with such high-level semantic content requires specific treatment that often departs from other areas in computer vision. While work on such problems has been carried out for many years, with synergies between document understanding and computer vision domains, reaching the high accuracy required for many applications is still a practical challenge. See more…

This workshop will comprise of the following:

  • Invited and peer reviewed papers related to the call for papers below
  • Keynote addresses by top researchers in the field
  • A challenge on Document VQA aiming to advance state of the art in text and documents

Call for Papers

The topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to the following:

● Document modeling, and representations
● Document structure and layout learning
● Cleansing and image enhancement techniques for scanned documents
● Semantic understanding of scene OR document content
● Table identification and extraction from business documents
● Multi-lingual scene text and document understanding
● Character and text recognition
● Scene text detection and recognition
● Scene text Visual Question Answering 
● Document Visual Question Answering 
● Scene text detection and recognition
● Visual document retrieval
● Handwriting recognition 
● Online Handwriting recognition 
● Signature detection and verification
● Graphics recognition 
● Applications of document analysis
● Document simulation and synthesis

Submissions

We are soliciting submissions of full length papers in PDF format, following CVPR 2020 submission guidelines. All submissions will be handled electronically via the workshop’s CMT Website.  Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the CVPR style. Additional pages containing only cited references are allowed. Please refer to the following files (same as the CVPR 2020 main conference format) for detailed formatting instructions:

Paper submission and review site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/WTDDLE2020

Challenge details

Please see the DocVQA challenge Web site at the Robust Reading Competition portal: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=17

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: March 31, 2020 (extended)
  • Notification to Authors: April 10, 2020
  • Workshop Camera Ready Due:  April 17, exact date to be announced
  • Workshop Date: June 15, 2020

Organizers

General Chairs:  Dimosthenis Karatzas – Computer Vision Centre, Autonomous University of Barcelona, R. Manmatha – Amazon AWS

Program Chairs: Alicia Fornes – Computer Vision Centre, Autonomous University of Barcelona, C.V. Jawahar – IIIT Hyderabad, Vijay Mahadevan – Amazon AWS

Organizing Chairs: Meng Wang – Amazon AWS, Jon Wu – Amazon AWS, Yuting Zhang – Amazon AWS

See more…


4) ICPR 2020 conference (postponed)

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

ICPR 2020 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.

Given the COVID-19 situation in Italy and all over the globe, the organizers of ICPR2020 believe that unfortunately full normality will not happen soon, and it seems unlikely that people will feel confident about making travel plans to attend a conference in September. Due to this, we have decided to to shift the conference schedule to 10-15 January 2021 and at the same time employ a two-round review process (similar to WACV), with the first-round deadline on April 15, 2020 and the second-round deadline on July 2020.

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

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

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

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

General Chairs
Rita Cucchiara, Alberto del Bimbo, Stan Sclaroff

See more…


5) ICFHR 2020 conference

17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition
September 7-10, 2020 – Dortmund, Germany

The International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) is the premier scientific venue in the field of handwriting recognition. This conference brings together international experts from academia and industry to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all aspects of handwriting recognition and applications.

The emergence of COVID-19 has caused disruption in every aspect of our professional and personal lives. In addition to care for family members no longer maintaining their regular schedules, many faculty are required to devote extra time to redesign courses to be taught online, and many corporations and universities are implementing new work-from-home measures. Given these disruptions that responding to the global health crisis has caused, the ICFHR organizing committee has decided to extend the submission date until April 10th.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Paper submission: April 10th, 2020 (extended)
Author notifications: June 8th, 2020

General Chairs
Gernot Fink, Lambert Schomaker

See more…


6) Job offers (9 new)

Please find more information in the following file:

— PhD position – Rochester Institute of Technology, USA (1 new) —

Computer Science PhD Position (start: Fall 2020)
Document and Pattern Recognition Lab – Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

PhD Topic: Math formula extraction, recognition, and indexing
Advisor: Dr. Richard Zanibbi (https://www.cs.rit.edu/~rlaz)

The Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (dprl) at RIT is looking for a new PhD student to work on extraction, recognition, and indexing of formulas in large collections as part of the MathSeer project starting in Fall 2020.

The MathSeer project (https://www.cs.rit.edu/~dprl/mathseer) is a collaborativeeffort between RIT, Penn State, and the University at Maryland, College Park.We are working to create new technologies for math-aware search. This includesnovel search interfaces and engines that integrate text and math in order toimprove search of technical information both within and across subject domains.The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the AlfredP. Sloan Foundation.

The dprl is a leader in math-aware search and recognition of math notation,particularly technologies for math formula entry, recognition, and search.Along with other members of the MathSeer team, we are overseeing the first ARQMath task at CLEF 2020 (Answer Retrieval for Questions on Math: https://www.cs.rit.edu/~dprl/ARQMath). We also recently led the CROHME 2019 competition at ICDAR 2019, the standard international benchmark for evaluation handwritten math recognition systems (https://www.cs.rit.edu/~crohme2019).

Questions about the position should be directed to the lab director, Richard Zanibbi (rxzvcs[at]rit.edu).

See more…

— PostDoc/senior – Luleå, Sweden (6 new)

Due to our recent success in research and the acquisition of funding we gladly announce that we have again 4 open post-doc stipends in the machine learning group here in Luleå, Sweden. If you know someone who might be interested, please inform them.

https://www.ltu.se/ltu/stipendier-priser/postdoc-stipendier?l=en

Furthermore, we have the option to hire two senior persons (also for longer periods than 2 years), if interested, I can give more information.

Best regards,
Marcus (marcus.liwicki[at]ltu.se)

— Research Engineer/PostDoc – IRISA/INSA Rennes, France (1 new)

Analysis systems for serial sources in collections of historical image documents

PDF version:
https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/en/postdoc-eurhisfirm

Important Dates

March 1, 2020 – August 31, 2021 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.).

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
  • Supervisors: Bertrand Coüasnon and Aurélie Lemaitre
  • Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits
  • Location: IRISA — Rennes, France

Missions

The post-doctoral fellow will join a team working on EURHISFIRM workflow. The goal is to extract information from images of financial documents from the 20th century. We mainly focus on two collections: yearbooks, which describes the companies and their administrators, and prices lists, which are newspapers showing the daily stock prices. Due to the large variety of those documents, it requires a flexible and easy-to-adapt document recognition system. It is based on a modelling of knowledge not only at the page level but also at the collection level in interaction with experts of the historical sources.

A first system has been designed, using DMOS-PI method. It uses a grammatical language, EPF (Enhanced Position Formalism), to describe a general page layout, with perceptive vision mechanisms, and an iterative analysis. The system also combines structural method with Deep Learning. For new collections, an adapted description of the document layout must be developed. This has to be done on a large range of structure levels: from very structured pages like table structures from stock exchange lists, up to a paragraph-oriented structures from yearbooks.

Some first experiments have been led on the recognition of “price lists” documents, on a specific French corpus. The objective of the work will be to generalize this system to other collections of price lists, from other countries. This requires to identify which are the common parts of price lists from each stock exchanges and countries, and how to make the system able to be adapted to a new collection in an easy way.

Applicant Requirements

  • PhD, Master degree or Engineering degree in computer science
  • Experience in document recognition, statistical analysis or deep learning.
  • Fluent English 
  • Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have.

Candidates should contact via email: Bertrand Coüasnon (bertrand.couasnon[at]irisa.fr) and Aurélie Lemaitre (aurelie.lemaitre[at]irisa.fr).

See more…

— Post-doc position – L3i – La Rochelle France (1 new) —

Title: Detection and verification of visual security devices in documents

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

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

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

Position Description

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

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

Qualifications

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

General Qualifications

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

Applications

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

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

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

Title : Recognition of text with variable styles in comics books

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

Position description

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

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 140 – January 2020

Welcome to the first 2020 TC10 newsletter.

Please note the extended deadline of the GREC-IJDAR special issue on Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding to February, 16th.
Also, DAS abstract submission deadline have been extended to January 15th (same as full paper submission) and ICPR workshop proposal submission deadline to January 25th.

Best wishes,
Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Table of content:
1) Upcoming deadlines and events
2) GREC-IJDAR special issue
3) DAS 2020 workshop
4) ICPR 2020 conference
5) Job offers

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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2020

2021 and later

  • September 5-10, 2021 conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • December, 2022 conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India


2) GREC-IJDAR special issue (extended deadlines)

The TC10 (Technical Committee on Graphic Recognition) proposes a special issue to be published in the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), Springer Nature:

Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding and beyond

This special issue is aimed to report the original and innovative advances in Graphics Recognition using deep learning methods. Thus, articles presenting reviews, perspectives, new methods and applications using deep learning for graphics recognition are cordially invited.

Guest editors : K.C. Santosh, University of South Dakota, USA – Jean-Christophe Burie, La Rochelle Université, France – Alicia Fornés, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain – Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, La Rochelle Université, France

Important EXTENDED dates
Paper submission deadline:     January 20, February 16, 2020 (extended)
First review notification:     March 20, Mai 10, 2020 (extended)
Decision (final notification):    June 20, July 10, 2020 (extended)
Production (Springer, IJDAR): August, September 2020 (extended)

More details at  https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/?page_id=645



3) DAS 2020 workshop (extended deadlines)

14th International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems
May 17-20, 2020 – Wuhan, China
http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/
Call for Papers: http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/?page_id=648

Important Dates

Regular paper submission
Abstract due: Dec. 13 Jan. 15, 2019 (extended)
Full papers due: Dec. 20 Jan. 15, 2010 (extended)
Notification of acceptance: Feb. 15 Mar. 18, 2020 (extended)
Tutorial proposals
Proposals due: Jan. 10, 2020
Short paper submission
Papers due: Mar. 10, 2020
Notification of acceptance: Mar. 18, 2020

DAS 2020 is the 14th edition of the workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches in document analysis and recognition. The workshop comprises invited speaker presentations, oral, poster, tutorial and demo sessions as well as working group d full papers) will be published by Springer.

Topics & Technologies

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

Submission Types

DAS2020 will include both long and short papers, posters and demonstrations of working or prototype systems. All submissions will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 3 reviews considering the originality of work, the quality of research or analysis of experience, the relevance to document analysis systems, and quality of presentation of ideas.

Full Papers

Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another forum, up to 15 pages length.

Short Papers

Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present 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 DAS2020 proceedings.

Demonstrations

DAS2020 seeks public demonstrations of novel systems, to be presented to the workshop as a whole during breaks between paper sessions. Prospective demonstrators should submit a two-page summary of the system to be demonstrated. Demonstration proposals will undergo review and summaries of accepted demonstrations will appear in the extra DAS2020 booklet, as in the case of short papers.

Cheng-Lin Liu, Shijian Lu, and Jean-Marc Ogier, DAS 2020 General Chairs
( das2020[at]vlrlab.net )

See more…


4) ICPR 2020 conference (workshop deadline extended)

25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
September 13-18, 2020 – Milan, Italy

ICPR 2020 will be held in Milan, the most international city in Italy, the second largest and most populated city in the country! Along with Paris, NY and London, Milan is worldwide renowned as one of the fashion capital, but it is also the Italian financial hub (hosting the National Stock Exchange) and will host Winter Olympics in 2026 sided by Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Looking to the future with its roots set deeply into its past, Milan will leave you breathless!

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Paper submission: March 2, 2020
Workshops proposal: January 15 25, 2020 (extended)
Competitions proposal: January 15, 2020
Tutorials proposal: April 1, 2020
Demos and Exhibits proposal: June 15, 2020

General Chairs
Rita Cucchiara, Alberto del Bimbo, Stan Sclaroff

See more…


5) Job offers

Please find more information in the following file:

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

Title : Recognition of text with variable styles in comics books

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

Position description

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

[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 139 – November 2019

ICDAR 2019 have been a great edition. Thanks to the organizing committee, keynote, participants for providing the document analysis community with excellent discussions, interactions and innovations.

Congratulations to Prof. Andreas Dengel for its IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award, Dr. Faisal Shafait and Dr. Xiang Bai for the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Awards!

GREC 2019 has been very interactive and successful with more than 100 participants at is peak. Thank you to the organizers and all the attendees.

This newsletter includes reports for GREC and SSDA 2019, call for papers for ICPR, DAS and DIAGRAMS 2020 as well as a special issue on Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding and beyond.

Finally, new datasets and educational materials have been added to TC10 website.

Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer


Table of content:
1) Upcoming deadline and events
2) GREC 2019 report
3) GREC-IJDAR special issue
4) IJDAR articles alert
5) SSDA report
6) ICPR 2020 conference
7) DAS 2020 workshop
8) DIAGRAMS conference 2020
9) ICFHR 2020 call for competitions
10) Datasets and materials (update)
11) Job offers

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


1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2019

  • December 13 abstract submission deadline for DAS 2020
  • December 13 competition proposal deadline for ICFHR 2020

2020 and later

  • January 10 20, 2020, paper submission deadline IJDAR special issue
  • January 24, 2020, paper pre-submission deadline DIAGRAMS 2020
  • March 2, 2020, paper submission deadline for ICPR 2020
  • March 5, 2020, paper submission deadline for ECCV 2020
  • May 17-20, 2020, workshop DAS 2020, Wuhan, China
  • August 23-28, 2020, conference ECCV 2020, Glasgow, UK
  • September 8-10, 2020 conference ICFHR 2020, Dortmund, Germany
  • September 13-18, 2020 conference ICPR 2020, Milan, Italy
  • September 7-10, 2021 conference ICDAR 2021, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • December, 2022 conference ICFHR 2022, Hyderabad, India

2) GREC 2019 report

13th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2019)
http://grec2019.univ-lr.fr/
20-21 September 2019, Sydney, Australia

The GREC workshop was a great opportunity for researchers to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. In this edition, 23 papers were presented, followed by highly interactive discussions. Some topics such as comics analysis, music score segmentation, sketch analysis, symbol classification were addressed by the participants. The first day of the workshop hosted more than 100 participants. The GREC organizers would like to thank all participants, since we could indeed enjoy a highly interactive GREC workshop, with many fruitful discussions concerning graphics recognition topic.

Jean-Christophe BURIE
General chair


3) IJDAR special issue

The TC10 (Technical Committee on Graphic Recognition) proposes a special issue to be published in the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), Springer Nature:

Deep learning for graphics recognition: document understanding and beyond

This special issue is aimed to report the original and innovative advances in Graphics Recognition using deep learning methods. Thus, articles presenting reviews, perspectives, new methods and applications using deep learning for graphics recognition are cordially invited.

Guest editors : K.C. Santosh, University of South Dakota, USA – Jean-Christophe Burie, La Rochelle Université, France – Alicia Fornés, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain – Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, La Rochelle Université, France

Important dates
Paper submission deadline:     Jan 10, 2020
First review notification:     March 20, 2020
Decision (final notification):    June 20, 2020
Production (Springer, IJDAR): August, 2020

More details at  https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/?page_id=645


4) IJDAR article alert

Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2019

Special issue: Advanced Topics in Document Analysis and Recognition
https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/22/3
Articles are currently freely available (few weeks after conference).

  • Editorial for special issue on “Advanced Topics in Document Analysis and Recognition”
    Cheng-Lin Liu, Andreas Dengel…
  • Are 2D-LSTM really dead for offline text recognition?
    Bastien Moysset, Ronaldo Messina
  • Boosting scene character recognition by learning canonical forms of glyphs
    Yizhi Wang, Zhouhui Lian, Yingmin Tang…
  • Generalized framework for summarization of fixed-camera lecture videos by detecting and binarizing handwritten content
    Bhargava Urala Kota, Kenny Davila…
  • Dynamic temporal residual network for sequence modeling
    Ruijie Yan, Liangrui Peng, Shanyu Xiao…
  • A comparison of local features for camera-based document image retrieval and spotting
    Quoc Bao Dang, Mickaël Coustaty…
  • Comic MTL: optimized multi-task learning for comic book image analysis
    Nhu-Van Nguyen, Christophe Rigaud…
  • A two-stage method for text line detection in historical documents
    Tobias Grüning, Gundram Leifert…
  • On optimal stopping strategies for text recognition in a video stream as an application of a monotone sequential decision model
    Konstantin Bulatov, Nikita Razumnyi…
  • An anchor-free region proposal network for Faster R-CNN-based text detection approaches
    Zhuoyao Zhong, Lei Sun, Qiang Huo
  • Handwritten Arabic text recognition using multi-stage sub-core-shape HMMs
    Irfan Ahmad, Gernot A. Fink
  • Coarse-to-fine document localization in natural scene image with regional attention and recursive corner refinement
    Anna Zhu, Chen Zhang, Zhi Li, Shengwu Xiong

Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2019

https://link.springer.com/journal/10032/22/4

  • Evaluation of word spotting under improper segmentation scenario
    Sounak Dey, Anguelos Nicolaou, Josep Lladós
  • Patch-based offline signature verification using one-class hierarchical deep learning
    Sima Shariatmadari, Sima Emadi…
  • HWNet v2: an efficient word image representation for handwritten documents
    Praveen Krishnan, C. V. Jawahar
  • HanFont: large-scale adaptive Hangul font recognizer using CNN and font clustering
    Jinhyeok Yang, Heebeom Kim, Hyobin Kwak…
  • A novel feature transform framework using deep neural network for multimodal floor plan retrieval
    D. Sharma, N. Gupta, C. Chattopadhyay…

5) SSDA report

The 3rd IAPR Summer School on Document Analysis 2019 was organized by National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in collaboration with Pakistan Pattern Recognition Society (PPRS) from August 19 -23, 2019 which the objective to impart the knowledge of state-of-the-art techniques in Pattern Recognition, particularly Deep Learning with their relevance to Document Analysis. Insightful talks and lectures, delivered by experts from all around the world, introduced the field of document analysis to the local participants along with advanced techniques and open challenges. The main topics covered during the five-day summer school included fundamentals of Document Analysis, Pattern Recognition, Deep Learning and the open research directions in document analysis and recognition.

The learning material was delivered in the form of lectures and hands-on practical sessions. The notable speakers who were a part of SSDA were Prof. Dr. Cheng-Lin Liu from China, Prof. Dr. Marcus Liwicki from Sweden, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schwanecke and Prof. Dr. Adrian Ulges from Germany, Prof. Dr. Seiichi Uchida from Japan, and Dr. Sheraz Ahmed from Germany. A programming and poster competition was also organized during the summer school, providing the participating students a chance to present their existing research work and get the expert feedback from international speakers.

One hundred and twenty-nine participants attended the event among which thirty were professionals from industry and academia, six were international students, while the remaining were local students from different areas of Pakistan including Abbottabad, Bahawalpur, Hazara, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Karak, Taxila, Peshawar, Azad Kashmir, and Mianwali. In order to assure maximum participation of the students and to promote the research in document analysis and pattern recognition at the national level, stipends to selected international and local students were awarded on behalf of IAPR.

In order to acquaint the speakers and participants with the culture and food of Pakistan, several social activities, lunches, dinners, and recreational activities were arranged. A highly commendable feedback was obtained from both the speakers and participants accompanied with suggestions on how the organization of the summer school can be further improved for the next edition.

Faisal Shafait


6) ICPR 2020 conference

25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition
September 13-18, 2020 – Milan, Italy

ICPR 2020 will be held in Milan, the most international city in Italy, the second largest and most populated city in the country! Along with Paris, NY and London, Milan is worldwide renowned as one of the fashion capital, but it is also the Italian financial hub (hosting the National Stock Exchange) and will host Winter Olympics in 2026 sided by Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Looking to the future with its roots set deeply into its past, Milan will leave you breathless!

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

PaperMarch 2, 2020
Workshops Proposal: January 15, 2020
Competitions Proposal: January 15, 2020
Tutorials Proposal: April 1, 2020
Demos and Exhibits Proposal: June 15, 2020

General Chairs
Rita Cucchiara, Alberto del Bimbo, Stan Sclaroff

See more…


7) DAS 2020 workshop

14th International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems
May 17-20, 2020 – Wuhan, China
http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/
Call for Papers: http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/?page_id=648

DAS 2020 is the 14th edition of the IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches in document analysis and recognition. The workshop comprises invited speaker presentations, oral, poster, tutorial and demo sessions as well as working group discussions. Proceedings (full papers) will be published by Springer.

DAS 2020 will be hosted by Huazhong University of Science and Technology(HUST) in Wuhan, China on May 17-20, 2020. Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province in central China, is a city with both an ancient history and a thriving present. As for HUST, it is a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary research university, which is among the first Universities joining the national “211 Project” and “985 Project”.

DAS2020 will include both long and short papers, posters and demonstrations of working or prototype systems. All submissions will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 3 reviews considering the originality of work, the quality of research or analysis of experience, the relevance to document analysis systems, and quality of presentation of ideas.

Paper Submission Instruction: http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/?page_id=719

Important Dates

Regular paper submission
Abstract due: Dec. 13, 2019
Full papers due: Dec. 20, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Feb. 15, 2020
Tutorial proposals
Proposals due: Jan. 10, 2020
Short paper submission
Papers due: Mar. 10, 2020
Notification of acceptance: Mar. 24, 2020

See more…


8) Diagrams conference 2020

11th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams
August 24-28, 2020 – Tallinn, Estonia
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/

Deadline for pre-submission: 24th January 2020

Diagrams 2020 is the eleventh conference in the biennial series that started in 2000. The multidisciplinary nature of Diagrams means it encompasses: architecture, art, artificial intelligence, biology, cartography, cognitive science, computer science, education, graphic design, history of science, human-computer interaction, linguistics, logic, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and software modelling. The conference attracts a large number of researchers from these interrelated fields, positioning Diagrams as the major international event in the area.

Main track
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/index.php/calls/main-track/

Psychology of Diagrams track
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/index.php/calls/psychology-of-diagrams/

Philosophy of Diagrams track
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/index.php/calls/philosophy/

In addition, Diagrams seeks to host Workshops and Tutorials:
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/index.php/calls/workshops/
http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/index.php/calls/tutorials/

For more information, please visit the website of the conference: http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2020/


9) ICFHR 2020 call for competitions

The ICFHR 2020 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions addressing current research challenges in handwriting recognition and related areas of pattern recognition and vision. Competitions should aim at evaluating the performance of individual methods and systems that fall within the context of the conference’s call for papers. Competitions should also participate in the sharing and standardization of handwriting recognition processes.

[View PDF version]

Proposals must contain the following information:

  1. A brief description of the competition, including which is the particular task under evaluation and why this competition could be of interest to the ICFHR community. If a similar competition has been held in a previous edition of ICFHR, the novel additions of the proposed one must be clearly explained.
  2. A draft of the outline of the competition describing which data is planned to be used, how will the submitted methods be evaluated and which performance measures will be used. Proposals should state explicitly whether data and annotations are already available or otherwise the timeframe to prepare them.
  3. How datasets and evaluation scripts will be made publicly available.
  4. The list of rules or best practices which will be imposed to participants (allowing multiple submissions or not, allowing external data or not, public ranking or not, etc.). Each competition relies on the academic integrity of the competitors.
  5. The names, contact information, and brief CVs of the competition organizers, outlining previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions.

Submissions

Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the ICFHR2020 Competitions Chairs:
Harold Mouchère and Dimosthenis Karatzas (competitions@icfhr2020.org)

Rules

The following rules will apply to the accepted competitions:

  • All competitions must run well in advance of the conference.
  • 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.
  • The name of the competition must be standardized by starting with “ICFHR2020” e.g. “ICFHR2020 Competition on …”;
  • Reports (full papers) on each competition will be reviewed and, if accepted (the competition run according to plan and is appropriately described), will be published in the ICFHR2020 conference proceedings.
  • The results of accepted competitions will be announced during a dedicated session of the conference. Competition organizers are expected to participate to this dedicated session during ICFHR 2020. Participants should be encouraged to present their algorithms (if not already done) in a conference paper at ICFHR 2020.
  • Participants should be encouraged to share their algorithms and code using one of the open-source licenses
  • Competitions must have sufficient number of participants (about 5, depending of the originality of the topic) to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
  • Each competition will be allocated some time in parallel to the poster session, during which they can run a mini-workshop (e.g. presenting results and conclusions, inviting winning methods to present their methods, lessons learnt, etc).
  • Each competition accepted to present results in the conference, should prepare a poster presentation and present it during ICFHR 2020

Important Dates

  • 13 December 2019: Submission of competition proposals.
  • 20 December 2019: Notification of acceptance.
  • 24 December: Competitions published on ICFHR2020 website and open to participants.
  • 14 June 2020: Deadline for submission for review of full papers describing the competitions. Papers must be sent directly to the Competitions Chairs.
  • 26 June 2020: Notification of acceptance.
  • 12 July 2020: Accepted camera-ready papers reporting on the competitions for inclusion in the proceedings.

If you have any questions, please contact the ICFHR2020 Competitions Chairs  (competitions@icfhr2020.org)

Online 

web: http://icfhr2020.org/competitions.html
twitter: @IAPR_TC11 #ICFHR2020 #ICFHR2020competitions
mail: competitions@icfhr2020.org
Call for competition: [PDF]


10) Dataset & materials (update)

We sorted several datasets of engineering drawings, floor plans, music scores and comics on TC10>Resources>Datasets.

We also added lecture and tutorial slides of SSDA2019 and GMPRDIA-ICDAR2019 on TC10>Resources>Educational materials.

11) Job offers

Please find more information in the following file:

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

Title : Recognition of text with variable styles in comics books

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

Position description

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