IAPR TC11 Newsletter
		            February 6, 2006

                   http://www.iapr-tc11.org


Announcements
=======================================================================
- ICDAR2009: Barcelona!
- Call for participation: IWFHR 2006 Online Tamil Handwritten Character
  Recognition Competition
- DIAL'06
=======================================================================

Reminders
=======================================================================
- IWFHR2006: submission deadline February 15, 2006
- ICDAR2007 Sponsorship
=======================================================================

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ICDAR2009

At the joint TC10/TC11 meeting during ICDAR2005 in Seoul, a comprehensive
proposal to host the Tenth International Conference on Document Analysis
and Recognition (ICDAR2009) in Barcelona was presented by Dr. Josep Llados.
The proposal received overwhelming approval from TC10/TC11 members during
the subsequent balloting. The ICDAR Advisory Board has also approved the
proposal with enthusiasm. We would like to congratulate the organizers and
wish them great success!


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Call for participation:

	 IWFHR 2006 Online Tamil Handwritten 
	 Character Recognition Competition

 This is the first major competition involving hand-written Tamil 
 characters, and the first release of a public ground-truthed Tamil 
 dataset. 

 A particular challenge compared to other OCR datasets (e.g. such as 
 MNist), is the relatively high number of classes (156), and the 
 relatively low number of training samples per class. 

 The objective of the competition is to recognize 156 different classes 
 of handwritten Tamil 'characters'. 

 Training data and subsequently test data for the problem will be 
 provided to registered participants in the following formats: 
 Online data in UNIPEN 1.0 format 
 Offline data as bi-level TIFF images derived from online data. 

 More details here: http://algoval.essex.ac.uk:8080/iwfhr2006/index.jsp 

 Simon M. Lucas
 IAPR TC5 Chair

 Sriganesh Madhvanath
 HP Labs India


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

DIAL'06 
2nd International Conference
on Document Image Analysis for Libraries
Lyon, France
April 27-28, 2006

Information http://liris.cnrs.fr/dial2006/


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

IWFHR 2006
10th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition
La Baule, France
October 23-26, 2006 

Paper submission deadline: February 15, 2006
http://www.irisa.fr/manifestations/2006/IWFHR/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

ICDAR2007

The 9th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
(ICDAR2007)
will be held in Curitiba, Brazil in September 23 - 26, 2007. It's not too
late
to become a sponsor! For details check
http://www.icdar2007.org/sponsors.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------




Dr. Jianying Hu, IAPR-TC11 Chair
jyhu@us.ibm.com

Dr. Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR-TC11 Vice Chair
A.Antonacopoulos@salford.ac.uk