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IAPR TC11 Newsletter
December 2009
http://www.iapr-tc11.org
========== Contents ========================================================
* Message from the Editor
* Dates 'n' Deadlines ... Upcoming after Christmas:
- DAS 2010, January 1, 2010 (short papers), extension to January 15 likely!
- ICPR 2010, January 15, 2010
* Calls for Papers
- FAHR 2010 (in conjunction with ICPR 2010), Istanbul, August 22
* Call for Participation
- ICFHR 2010 Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition
* Call for a New TC11 Logo (Repost)
* Job Opportunities
- Research Fellow in Document Image Analysis, CVC, Barcelona (repost)
* Call for Contributions
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========== Message from the Editor =========================================
Welcome to the December edition of our TC11 newsletter. This edition
brings to you news related to the recognition of Arabic handwriting.
As one of its co-chairs it is a pleasure for me to announce the first
edition the Int. Workshop on Frontiers in Arabic Handwriting Recognition
(FAHR 2010) to be held in conjunction with ICPR 2010 in Istanbul.
Furthermore, following the success of the previous events there will be
a new edition of the Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition in
conjunction with ICFHR 2010.
Below you will also find an updated version of the Dates 'n' Deadlines
section. Additionally, I would like to draw you attention to our ongoing
efforts for obtaining a new logo for TC-11. We would be very happy if the
calmness at the turn of the year would boost your creativity and provide
us with high-quality logo proposals.
With the best wishes for a Merry Christmas and
a happy and also successful New Year,
Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor
Gernot.Fink@udo.edu
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========== Dates 'n' Deadlines =============================================
Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* DAS 2010, Cambridge, MA June 9-11 January 1, 2009
(http://cubs.buffalo.edu/DAS2010/) (short papers!)
* ICPR 2010, Istanbul August 23-26 January 15, 2010
(http://www.icpr2010.org/)
* ICFHR 2010, Kolkata November 16-18 February 15, 2010
(http://www.isical.ac.in/~icfhr2010/)
* FAHR 2010, Istanbul August 22 March 19, 2010
(http://fahr2010.cs.tu-dortmund.de/)
* DocEng2010, Manchester, UK, September 21-24 April 2, 2010
(http://www.primaresearch.org/doceng2010)
* BMVC 2010, Aberystwyth, UK August 30-September 2 April 30, 2010
(http://bmvc10.dcs.aber.ac.uk)
* ICDAR 2011, Bejing September 18-21 March 1, 2011
(http://www.icdar2011.org/)
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========== Calls for Papers ================================================
1st International Workshop on
Frontiers in Arabic Handwriting Recognition
-- FAHR 2010 --
in conjunction with
20th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)
Istanbul, Turkey, 22nd August 2010
** Co-Chairs:
Thomas Ploetz, Newcastle University, UK -- t.ploetz@ncl.ac.uk
Gernot A. Fink, TU Dortmund, Germany -- gernot.fink@udo.edu
Sabri A. Mahmoud, KFUPM Dhahran, Saudi Arabia -- smasaad@kfupm.edu.sa
Szilard Vajda, TU Dortmund, Germany -- szilard.vajda@udo.edu
** Program committee
A. S. E. Ahmed, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt
A. S. Al-Salman, KSU, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
A. Belaid, LORIA, Nancy, France
N. Ben Amara, ENISO, Sousse, Tunesia
D. Doermann, University of Maryland, USA
V. Govindaraju, SUNY Buffalo (CUBS), USA
A. Kundu, MITRE, USA
L. Likforman-Sulem, Telecom ParisTech, France
V. Maergner, TU Braunschweig, Germany
P. Natarajan, BBN Technologies, USA
U. Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, India
S. Srihari, CEDAR, USA
Arabic script is of substantial influence for hundreds of
millions of people worldwide. Numerous applications in
different areas of automated document processing require robust
recognition techniques for the analysis of Arabic handwriting.
Substantial challenges lie in the high variance in character
appearance, the highly idiosyncratic omittance of vowels,
common ambiguities in writing, or the omnipresence of
touching characters. For robust Arabic handwriting recognition,
massive research efforts are demanded.
In order to provide a place to meet and discuss current issues
related to Arabic handwriting recognition, FAHR 2010 -- the
1st International Workshop on Frontiers in Arabic Handwriting
Recognition -- will be held in conjunction with ICPR 2010.
It aims at bringing together researchers -- both from academia
and industry -- as well as practitioners in the field of Arabic
handwriting recognition. Given its unique location within the
city of Istanbul, Turkey, at the border between the Arabian
and the western world, researchers working in the field are
invited to participate in FAHR 2010.
** Topics
FAHR2010 seeks original, unpublished contributions, that are
not currently under review by another conference or journal, in
all areas related to Arabic handwriting recognition, including
(but not limited to) the following:
- Preprocessing
- Script identification
- Line segmentation
- Word segmentation
- Recognition strategies
- Feature extraction
- Writing models
- Language modelling
- Systems
- Datasets and evaluation
- Relation between OCR and handwriting recognition
** Submission Guideline
Prospective authors should prepare full papers with a maximum
length of six pages (double column, IEEE style, PDF). Manuscripts
will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee.
Printed proceedings will be distributed to the participants together
with electronic copies on CDROM. All accepted papers will be
published electronically as Open Access by the library service of
TU Dortmund University
(https://www.ub.tu-dortmund.de/Eldorado/index.html).
** Important Dates
Manuscript submission: 19.3.2010
Authors notification: 30.4.2010
Submission of camera-ready papers: 14.5.2010
End of early bird registration: 14.5.2010
Workshop: 22.8.2010
** Contact, further information
Thomas Ploetz, t.ploetz@ncl.ac.uk
http://fahr2010.cs.tu-dortmund.de
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========== Call for Participation ==========================================
********************
ICFHR 2010
CALL FOR COMPETITION
********************
ICFHR2010 Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition
-----------------------------------------------------------
Kolkata, INDIA
November 16-18, 2010
http://www.isical.ac.in/~icfhr2010/competitions.html
This Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition aims to bring together
researchers working on Arabic handwriting recognition. Since 2002 the
freely available If N/ENIT-Database is used by many groups all over the
world to develop Arabic handwriting recognition systems. This database was
the basis for the last years competitions for systems recognizing Arabic
handwritten words. Whereas these competitions were used on a fixed lexicon
with 973 Tunisian town names, this ICFHR competition uses as a next step
the same background of the If N/ENIT-Database but now with new collected
data of freely written text of about five lines. The fourth competition
takes place at the 12th International Conference on Frontiers in
Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2010), November 16-18, 2010, Kolkata, India.
Evaluation Process:
The objective is to run each Arabic handwritten word recognizer, trained
on the If N/ENIT- Database, version 2.0 and on a set of the new collected
data. A recognizer may return up to 10 candidates for each classification
that not only the first ranked result can be used for comparison but also
the correct result between the 5 or 10 candidates will be used for
comparison. The following tasks are part of evaluation:
** The recognition results on word level of each system are compared on
the basis of correct recognized words / respective there dedicated
ZIP(Post)-Codes. A dictionary can be used and should include all 937
different Tunisian town/village names.
** The systems are tested on the new data, which includes segmentation and
recognition of words from IfN/ENIT-lexicon and words out of this lexicon.
Running a Recognizer:
We run your recognizer (called myrec) by invoking it from the command line
as follows: "myrecdataset.txt output.txt"
**dataset.txt: The dataset is just a list of relative paths to each binary
*.tif or *.bmp image to be recognized.
**output.txt: The output file should have one line for each input image.
Each line should show the name of the image file that was recognized,
followed by the responses (corresponding reference codes) for that image.
Each response is given as a pair of values: the text, followed by the
confidence. The following example shows that for image word/1/1.tif the
recognizer has produced three word hypotheses: Code 1000, 2000 and 3000,
with confidences of 1.0, 0.8 and 0.4 respectively.
word/1/1.tif 1000 1.0 2000 0.8 3000 0.4
Important Dates:
Deadline for submission of systems: March 01, 2010
Organizers:
Volker Maergner and Haikal El Abed
(v.maergner@tu-bs.de and elabed@tu-bs.de)
Institute for CommunicationsTechnology (IfN)
Braunschweig Technical University
www.ifn.ing.tu-bs.de
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========== Call for a New TC11 Logo (Repost) ===============================
In line with its efforts to revive TC11 activities and give TC11 related
content a fresh "look and feel", the TC11 Leadership Team is seeking a new
logo design for TC11. This logo should firstly show a modern design suitable
for representing an association of professional scientists and engineers
working at the forefront of research and development. Secondly, it would be
highly desirable that the logo could be easily associated with professionals
working in the area of Reading Systems by, e.g., incorporating - potentially
abstract - references to typical objects or attributes of our profession
(as achieved nicely in the logo of the IEEE Signal Processing Society).
Though the logo's primary use will be on the web site of TC11 the design
should also be suitable for use in print publications.
Please send design proposals for the new TC11 logo before
December 31, 2009
to the TC11 Chair Daniel P. Lopresti (lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu) in a
suitable digital format (bitmap[s] with resolutions appropriate for web and
print publications, PDF, or a commonly used vector graphics format).
The TC11 Leadership Team will then review the received logo proposals and
select a winning proposal. The TC11 Leadership Team reserves the right to
extend the deadline and/or discontinue the contest if no suitable logo is
submitted within the indicated time frame. The creator of the winning proposal
will be receiving an award consisting of a certificate and a small cash prize.
NOTE: By making a design proposal the proposer certifies that the proposed
logo is his/her own work and does not violate intellectual property
rights or copyrights of some third party. Furthermore she/he explicitly
accepts that the logo design thereafter becomes the sole property of
TC11 and that the only compensation to the creator of the design will
be the award presented by TC11 and the recognition of his/her
achievement by the wider community.
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========== Job Opportunities ===============================================
The Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis group at the Computer Vision
Centre (www.cvc.uab.es), Barcelona, Spain, offers one research fellow
position in the area of Document Image Analysis. The successful applicant
will join an ongoing European project and will be the main responsible
for a 12-month work package on administrative document analysis.
A PhD degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics or
related discipline is required. Applicants will be expected to have a
minimum of 4 years research experience in at least one of the following
areas: Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, Document Analysis. Previous
experience with handwritten document recognition would be highly valued.
The positions are initially available for a period of 1 year, with
possibility for extension. The candidate will be expected to start before
June 2010. Minimum net salary will be at the level of EUR 35000 negotiable
depending upon background and experience. A mobility allowance will be
available according to the particular needs of the successful candidate.
Please see the Web site of the CVC or contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas
for further information:
Email: dimos@cvc.uab.es
Web: http://www.cvc.uab.es
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========== Call for Contributions ==========================================
This newsletter needs your support in order to provide useful information
to the TC11 community. Therefore, please contribute relevant news by sending
a short notice to the newsletter editor Gernot A. Fink .
Such news could be the obvious announcements of confereces and workshops,
job opportunities, reports on past conferences, book reviews, or anything
that might be of interest to a wider audience involved in the construction of
reading systems.
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