IAPR-TC11 Newsletter December 6, 2006 http://www.iapr-tc11.org Report ======================================================================= - 10th IWFHR, Oct. 23-26, 2006 ======================================================================= Announcements ======================================================================= - IWFHR promoted to ICFHR - Location of ICFHR2010: Siliguri, India - Call for Participation: AGNOSTIC LEARNING vs. PRIOR KNOWLEDGE - Call for Papers: ICDAR2007 - Open source release: Lipi Toolkit for handwriting recognition ======================================================================= ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Workshop Report: IWFHR2006 10th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition La Baule, France October 23 - 26, 2006 The 10th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (IWFHR2006) took place in La Baule, France from October 23 to 26, 2006. Previous editions of this workshop were held in Montreal (1990), Bonas (1991), Buffalo (1993), Taipei (1994), Colchester (1996), Taejon City (1998), Amsterdam (2000), Niagara-on-the-Lake (2002), and Tokyo (2004). The workshop was organized under the auspices of the IAPR Technical Committee 11 on 'Reading Systems'. The aim of IWFHR is to provide a forum for the exchange of knowledge in the field of handwriting recognition. Both modalities, on-line and off-line, are considered. There are a number of well-established applications of handwriting recognition, for example, reading of postal addresses, bank checks, and forms. However, in the recent past, we have seen new applications emerging, for example, from novel digital pen and paper devices, from pen-based man-machine interfaces for PDAs, smart phones, and tablet PCs. Also the development of digital libraries, and in particular the task of converting historical archives into electronic format, has led to a new interest in handwriting recognition. The workshop received 133 submissions from 24 countries and four continents. Out of these submissions, 38 papers were selected for oral presentation and another 60 for the poster sessions. The workshop was attended by 140 participants from 21 different countries. Because of many potential commercial applications, there was a good mixture of people from industry and academia at the workshop. The papers were organized in nine oral and three poster sessions. Posters were orally introduced by the authors in a so-called 'poster teaser' session, where each author was given one minute time to highlight the main contributions of his or her poster. There were two invited talks, one on 'Some Recent Advances in Machine Learning' by Olivier Bousquet, and the other on 'Language Models for Handwriting Recognition' by Joshua Goodman. Also, there was an invited session where the projects RIMES and InkML were addressed, and the results of a competition on on-line Tamil handwritten character recognition were announced. The winner of the contest was Zsolt Wimmer from Vision Objects. The best student paper award was given to the Paper 'A new algorithm for detecting text line in handwritten documents' by Y. Li, Y. Zheng, D. Doerman, and S. Jaeger. Prof. Ch. Suen received an award for having initiated this workshop series. Interest in Japanese and Chinese handwriting recognition has been traditionally high at IWFHR. This time, one could recognize rising interest in the recognition of other non-Roman languages and scripts, particularly in Arabic and Indian handwriting recognition. The fact that there are 24 official languages with 12 different scripts in India clearly underlines the need for research in non-western languages and scripts. The location of the workshop, La Baule, is a lovely resort town in South Brittany at the Atlantic coast in France. In addition to purely scientific aspects, there was ample room for personal and social interactions among the participants. Conference registration started on the evening before the first day, accompanied by a reception where the participants were welcomed by the deputy mayor of the town. On the evening of the first workshop day, a dinner with specialities from the regional cuisine was served. The banquet on the evening of the second day was surely a highlight of the social program. It was served during a cruise on the Erdre river in the region of Nantes. Before the dinner there was an opportunity to participate in a city tour of Nantes and visit a local winery. In addition to IAPR, there were a number of sponsors of this workshop, including the Universities of Nantes, Rennes, Rouen, INSA Rennes, LIP6, Foundation Michel Metevier, Region Pays de la Loire, International Unipen Foundation, as well as a number of companies, including Microsoft Research, Vision Objects, A2iA, HP invent, & France Telecom, Ladservices, and Parascript. The workshop proceedings are available online at : http://hal.inria.fr/IWFHR10/en/ and http://hal.ccsd.cnrs.fr/IWFHR10/en Guy Lorette, Horst Bunke, Lambert Schomaker General Co-Chairs of IWFHR2006 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- IWFHR promoted to ICFHR In recognition of the growing influence and status of IWFHR, its name will be officially changed to ICFHR starting with the 2008 instalment. The 11th International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2008) will be held from August 19 to 21 University, Montreal, Canada. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Location of ICFHR2010: Siliguri, India The site of ICFHR2010 was determined at IWFHR2006 through balloting following presentations of competing proposals. The 12th International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2010) will take place in Siliguri, Darjeeling, India from September 27 to 30, 2010. Congratulations to the organizers! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Call for Participation ==> AGNOSTIC LEARNING vs. PRIOR KNOWLEDGE <== http://www.agnostic.inf.ethz.ch/ "When everything fails, ask for additional domain knowledge" Does adding domain/prior knowledge really help or can we use as well "dumb" features and a good learning algorithm? You will get to compete on 5 classification problems for which you are provided with both the raw data and preprocessed data. One problem is handwritten digit recognition. You can extract smart features and boost your classifiers performance with domain/prior knowledge. Alternatively, you can rely on the preprocessed data and work on improving your generic classification algorithms. ==> Workshops <== The results of the challenge will be discussed at 2 workshops: 1) NIPS 2006 workshop on multi-level inference http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/NIPS2006/ The agnostic learning track of the challenge is used to implement a model selection game. Win one of two prizes (and get to ski at Whistler!) 2) IJCNN 2007 workshop on agnostic learning vs. prior knowledge http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/agnostic/ Other prizes will be awarded (TBA). ==> Publications <== To submit a full length paper on model selection, see the call for paper: http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/modelselect/call-for-papers.html The results of the challenge can be submitted to IJCNN 2007 to be published in the proceedings. The book on feature extraction with the results of the first challenge is now available: http://clopinet.com/fextract-book/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Call For Papers ICDAR2007 September 23 -- 26, 2007 Curitiba, Brazil Paper submission deadline: January 15, 2007 http://www.icdar2007.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Open Source Release Announcement Lipi Toolkit HP Labs India is happy to announce the release into open source of Lipi Toolkit, a toolkit for building online handwriting recognition engines. Version 1.0 supports recognition of isolated online handwritten characters/shapes. More details and download instructions are available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/india/lipitk -------------------------------------------------------------------------- With best regards, Dr. Jianying Hu, IAPR-TC11 Chair jyhu@us.ibm.com Dr. Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR-TC11 Vice Chair A.Antonacopoulos@salford.ac.uk -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To UNSUBSCRIBE visit: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/iapr-tc11