[IAPR-TC10] Newsletter 160 – March 2026

Posted on by Christophe Rigaud

We are delighted to present the 160th edition of the IAPR-TC10 newsletter.

This month, we bring you upcoming events and opportunities to engage with fellow researchers and practitioners. Special focus on the next summer school on document analysis and most relevant ICPR/ICDAR competions and workshops.

Whether you are a long-time member or new to our community, we hope this newsletter inspires and informs your work. Thank you for being part of IAPR-TC10—let’s continue to advance the field together!

Best regards,
Christophe Rigaud
IAPR-TC10 Communications Officer

Table of content:

1) Upcoming deadlines and events
2) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events
3) IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis
4) ICDAR 2026 competition selection
5) ICDAR 2026 workshop selection
6) ICPR 2026 workshop selection

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

Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC10 community, please consider joining the TC10 mailing list by clicking the join us button on the main page the website.

1) Upcoming deadlines and events

2026

  • Deadlines
    • 20 March, summer school on document analysis (SSDA) registration deadline
    • 3rd May, MANPU workshop full paper submission deadline
    • 16 May, TrustDoc workshop full paper submission deadline
    • 20 May, HIP and WoRMS workshop full paper submission deadline
    • 22nd May, DAS workshop full paper submission deadline
  • Events:
    • May 25-29, summer school SSDA 2026, Vall de Núria, Catalonia, Spain
    • August 17-22, conference ICPR 2026, Lyon, France
    • August 30- Sept. 04, conference ICDAR 2026, Vienna, Austria

2) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events

The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference.

In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events:

  • ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in 2029)
  • DAS: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in 2028)
  • HIP: International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (satellite event of ICDAR; next possibility in 2027)
  • GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2027)
  • SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (next possibility in 2027).

Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to kc.santosh@usd.edu and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.

3) IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis

6th summer school on document analysis focused on next-generation Document Understanding, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and structured knowledge representation.

The program combines foundational lectures to hands-on practice sessions and solving real-world industry challenges in collaborative teams.

Five days immersed in document analysis in an extraordinary mountain valley.

Location: Vall de Núria, Catalonia (Transport from Barcelona included in registration fee)

Key dates:

  • Pre-registration deadline: March 20
  • Acceptance notification: March 28
  • Summer School: May 25–29, 2026

For more information, and pre-registration: https://ssdag.cvc.uab.es/
Previous editions are listed here: https://iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr/?page_id=151

4) ICDAR 2026 competition selection

Here are the 2 from 8 competitions that we think will most interest TC10 newsletter readers (full list available here: https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/)

ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains (DocVQA2026)

Building on the successful DocVQA series of competitions, this new competition aims to test the multi-modal reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models on 8 different document domains: business reports, scientific papers, slides, scientific posters, maps, comics, infographics, and engineering drawings.

Important Dates:

  • January 30, 2026: Validation set is published.
  • March 3, 2026: Test set available on the evaluation server.
  • April 3, 2026: Competition results deadline.
  • April 17, 2026: Competition report submission due.
  • June 22, 2026: Competition winners announced.

For more information and to participate: https://www.docvqa.org/challenges/2026

ICDAR 2026 Competition on Writer and Pen Identification from Hand-Drawn Circles (CircleID)

CircleID is the ICDAR 2026 competition on identifying who drew a circle and which pen was used, using only scanned images of hand-drawn circles. Although a circle is a simple shape, it contains rich, subtle cues from both human motor behavior and pen/ink characteristics. The challenge is to learn representations that disentangle writer style from pen properties in static images.

Participants receive a new dataset of 46155 scanned, circle images collected under controlled conditions from more than 51 writers and 8 pens. Two tasks are evaluated: (1) writer identification (with an “unknown writer” class) and (2) pen classification.

For more information and to participate: https://thomasgorges.github.io/icdar2026-circleid/

5) ICDAR 2026 workshop selection

Here are the 3 from 8 workshop that we think will most interest TC10 newsletter readers (full list available here: https://icdar2026.org/index.php/workshops/)

DAS2026 Document Analysis System

The 2026 edition will take place in Vienna, Austria. DAS 2026 provides a platform for researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts to contribute to addressing the critical issues in practical document analysis systems. Through DAS 2026, we highlight the transformative power of document analysis technologies and encourage a forward-looking dialogue on their future trajectory in light of the advances of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models, ensuring the workshop not only reflects the state of the art, but also inspires the next wave of technological advancements in document analysis systems.

Topics of interest:

Submission Types:

Typically, the workshop covers invited speaker talks along with oral, poster, tutorial, demo sessions and working group discussions. DAS 2026 will accept contributions of the following types:

  • Full Papers: Full papers should describe complete works of original research in topics relevant to the workshop and should not exceed 17 pages (including figures and references). Accepted submissions will be presented during the workshop (orally or by poster) and published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
  • Short Papers: Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress, to present live applied demos and novel positions on document analysis systems. Accepted short papers must not exceed 8 pages (including figures and references) and will appear in an extra booklet (non-archived), not in the official proceedings.
  • Demos: As usual, DAS 2026 will host a demonstration session where participants can show their technologies and scientific contributions in a hands-on environment. The demos will be aligned with the poster sessions of the workshop, providing adequate time for interaction. In order to participate, interested personnel should submit a short paper not exceeding 6 pages overviewing the detailed technical specifications and practical aspects of the proposed demo.

Important Dates (NO EXTENSIONS, all deadlines are AoE time):

Full paper submission: Friday, 22nd May, 2026
Full paper acceptance notification: Monday, 15th June, 2026
Full papers camera-ready: Monday, 22nd June, 2026
Short papers/demos submission: Monday, 29th June, 2026
Short papers/demos acceptance notification: Monday, 13th July, 2026
Short papers camera-ready: Monday, 20th July, 2026
Workshop Dates: Thursday, 3rd September, 2026 – Friday, 4th September, 2026

For more information and to submission process: https://das2026.seecs.edu.pk


HIP: 8th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing

It is our pleasure to announce that the 8th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP’26) will be held in conjunction with ICDAR2026, on 3-4 September 2026 in Vienna, Austria.

The workshop brings together researchers working with historical documents and intends to be complementary and synergistic to the work in analysis and recognition featured in the main sessions of ICDAR, the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners in the document analysis community.

Submissions are received until 20 May 2026 (Time zone: Anywhere on Earth) via CMT and undergo review by the members of the Program Committee.

Submissions must follow the ICDAR guidelines and template provided. It is not required to anonymize the submission, but authors are welcome to do so if they prefer it. Acceptance notifications will be sent out 22 June 2026, with camera ready submissions due on 29 June 2026.

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Imaging and Image Acquisition
  • Digital Archiving Considerations
  • Document Restoration/Improving readability
  • Document Content Acquisition and Information Extraction
  • Family History Documents and Genealogies
  • Automated Classification, Grouping and Hyperlinking of Historical Documents
  • Digital Humanities applications of document analysis and recognition
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for historical documents

For more information and submission process: https://blog.sbb.berlin/hip2026/

WoRMS: 7th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems

The workshop seeks to connect researchers from the field of Optical Music Recognition with potential users. We are open for everything that is related to music, that has been written. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Music reading systems
  • Optical music recognition
  • Datasets and performance evaluation
  • Image processing on music scores
  • Sheet music search
  • Writer identification
  • Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores
  • Multi-modal systems
  • Novel input-methods to produce written music
  • Web-based Music Information Retrieval services
  • Applications and projects 
  • Use-cases related to written music

We strive to make the workshop as interactive as possible, with participants getting the opportunity not just to present their work, but to discuss current research and foster relationships within the community. Therefore, promising ideas, work-in-progress submissions and recently submitted or published works are equally welcome.

Important Dates

  • Deadline for submission: 20 May 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: 22 June 2026
  • Camera ready: 30 June 2026
  • Workshop: 4 September 2026, Vienna

For more information and submission process: https://sites.google.com/view/worms2026/home

6) ICPR 2026 workshop selection

Here are the 2 from 29 (!) workshops that we think will most interest TC10 newsletter readers (full list available here: https://icpr2026.org/workshops.html)

7th International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding

Comics is a medium constituted of images combined with text and other visual information in order to narrate a story. Nowadays, comic books are a widespread cultural expression all over the world. The market of comics continues to grow, for example, the market in Japan is about 4.25 billion USD in 2015. Moreover, from the research point of view, comics images are attractive targets because the structure of a comics page includes various elements (such as panels, speech balloons, captions, leading characters, and so on), the drawing of which depends on the style of the author and presents a large variability. Therefore comics image analysis is not a trivial problem and is still immature compared with other kinds of image analysis.

Important dates

Title / abstract submission due: April 26th, 2026
Paper submission due: May 3rd, 2026
Notification of acceptance: June 1st, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: June 14th, 2026
Workshop: August 22nd, 2026

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

Contact : i-m-manpu2026-inquiry@ml.omu.ac.jp
More information: https://manpu2026.imlab.jp


TrustDoc Trustworthy Document Understanding: Privacy, Unlearning, Robustness, and Explainability

Pattern recognition is the foundation of modern document image understanding, supporting progress in document classification, handwritten text recognition, DocVQA, and multimodal modeling of text, layout, and visual structure. As these systems are increasingly deployed in real-world, high-stakes environments, they must meet new expectations for trust, safety, and regulatory compliance. Current document image models are required to support machine unlearning, to resist imperceptible document forgeries and membership inference attacks, to preserve the privacy of sensitive handwritten or scanned data, and to offer transparent and interpretable decisions. These demands raise fundamental research questions on how models memorise and forget document-specific features, how handwritten text recognition can remain robust under regime changes, and how multimodal document representations should be evaluated from ethical and trustworthiness perspectives. 

The workshop invites contributions that advance this emerging area. It specifically welcomes contributions on topics including (but not limited to):

Machine unlearning in document AI

Robustness in document image recognition systems

Privacy in document image understanding

Explainability and interpretability

Evaluation, benchmarks, and best practices

Applications and case studies

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: 16/05/2026 CET
  • Notification to Authors: 11/06/2026 CET
  • Camera-ready Deadline: 18/06/2026 CET
  • Workshop Date: 21/08/2026 CET

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in the ICPR Workshops Proceedings within the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer series. All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop.

Contact

Email: lkang@cvc.uab.es, dimos@cvc.uab.es 
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/trustdoc/home

You reached the end, hope you enjoyed reading the IAPR-TC10 newsletter n°160.