============================================================================ IAPR TC11 Newsletter February 2011 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICDAR 2011, Beijing, March 14, 2011 (extended!!!) * Calls for Papers - International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2011), October 11-13, Washington, DC - First Int. Workshop on Historical document Imaging and Processing (HIP 2011) September 16-17 (in conjunction with ICDAR) - Fourth Int. Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2011), September 22 (in conjunction with ICDAR) - First Int. Workshop and Tutorial on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA 2011), September 17-18 (in conjunction with ICDAR) * Announcements of New Datasets - KAIST Scene Text Dataset * Job Opportunities (repost) - PhD positions in the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group, Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain - Internship at Xerox Research Centre Europe, France * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the February edition of our TC-11 newsletter. This edition first of all brings good news to everybody who was worried about meeting the deadline for submitting papers to ICDAR: It was extended to March 14! Additionally, I would like to remind you that also the deadline for submitting tutorial proposals for ICDAR is still open. It was extended to April 20 quite a while ago. Furthermore, this newsletter brings to you more Calls for Papers for workshops to be held in conjunction with this years ICDAR in Bejing, and the Call for Papers for IJCB 2011 which will take place in Washington, DC. Last but not least, you will find below the announcement of the KAIST Scene Text Dataset. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICDAR 2011, Beijing September 18-21 March 14 (ext.) (http://www.icdar2011.org/) - Tutorial proposals: April 20 (ext.) * CAIP 2011, Seville August 29-31 March 25 (http://congreso.us.es/caip2011/) * IJCB 2011, Washington, DC October 11-13 May 27 (http://www.cse.nd.edu/IJCB_11) * HIP 2011 (at ICDAR 2011) September 16-17 June 10 (http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~hdocp) * AND 2011, (at ICDAR 2011) September 17 June 14 (http://sites.google.com/site/and2011workshop/) * CBDAR 2011, (at ICDAR 2011) September 22 June 15 (http://imlab.jp/cbdar2011/) * AFHA 2011, (at ICDAR 2011) September 17-18 June 15 (http://forensic.to/webhome/afha/) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: IJCB 2011 ====================================== IJCB 2011: International Joint Conference on Biometrics Biometrics Systems -> Theory - Modeling - Performance - Applications October 11-13, 2011 Washington, DC, USA http://www.cse.nd.edu/IJCB_11 IMPORTANT DATES: Paper submission due: May 27, 2011 Notification of results: July 15, 2011 Final paper due: Aug 12, 2011 ____________________________________________________________________________ The 2011 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2011) is a special combination of two major biometrics research conferences, the Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) conference and the International Conference on Biometrics (ICB). The blending of these two conferences for this one year is through special agreement of the IEEE and the IAPR, and should present an exciting event for the entire worldwide biometrics research community. The organizers invite you to submit high quality, original full research papers by *MAY 27, 2011*. Submitted papers may not be accepted or under review elsewhere. Submissions may be up to eight pages in conference format (double blind reviewing). Papers accepted and presented at IJCB 2011 will be published in the conference proceedings in the IEEE Xplore library. Full details on the paper format, electronic submission procedure, conference events and venue can be found on the http://www.cse.nd.edu/IJCB_11 conference site. IJCB 2011 is intended to have a broad scope includes advances in fundamental pattern recognition techniques relevant to biometrics, new algorithms and / or technologies for biometrics, analysis of specific applications, and analysis of the social impacts of biometrics technology. Areas of coverage include biometrics based on voice, fingerprint, iris, face, handwriting, gait and other modalities, as well as multi-modal biometrics and new biometrics based on novel sensing technologies. Submissions will be rigorously reviewed, and should clearly make the case for a documented improvement over the existing state of the art. Experimental results for contributions in established areas such as voice, face, iris, fingerprint, and gait are encouraged to use the largest and most challenging existing publicly available datasets. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: iris biometrics, speaker recognition, fingerprint methods, vascular biometrics, security and privacy, biometric encryption, cancellable biometrics, anti-spoofing methods, writer recognition, ear biometrics, multibiometrics fusion, 2D/3D face recognition, hand geometry, palmprint/footprint recognition, gait, novel biometrics, facial aging effects, social impact analysis, usability studies, remote biometrics, performance evaluation, illumination-invariance, covariate analysis, soft biometrics biometric databases, DNA biometrics, novel sensors and applications. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: General Chairs: Kevin Bowyer (University of Notre Dame, US) Rama Chellappa (University of Maryland, US) Program Chairs: Terry Boult (University of Colorodo, CS, US) Josef Kittler (University of Surrey, UK) Ajay Kumar (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK) Advisory Board: Anil Jain (Michigan State University, US) Mark Nixon (University of Southamption, UK) Jonathon Phillips (NIST, US) Tieniu Tan (NLPR, CN) Massimo Tistarelli (University of Sassari, IT) Kar-Ann Toh (Yonsei University, KR) Publications Chair: Patrick Flynn (University of Notre Dame, US) Finance Chair: Arun Ross (West Virgenia University, US) FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.cse.nd.edu/IJCB_11 ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: HIP 2011 (updated) ============================= Call for Papers: First International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP) Beijing, China, Sept. 16-17, 2011, (at ICDAR 2011) (http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~hdocp) HIP seeks to bring together research in all aspects of imaging, collection and processing of historical documents, including * Imaging and Image Acquisition * Digital Archiving Considerations * Historical Collections * Document Restoration/Improving readability * Content Extraction * Family History Documents and Genealogies * Automated Classification, Grouping and Hyperlinking of Historical Documents Authors should submit original work in these or related areas. Accepted papers will be published electronically and in the conference proceedings. Important Dates: June 10, 2011 Manuscripts due July 10, 2011 Acceptance notification August 10, 2011 Camera-ready manuscript due August 10, 2011 Advance registration due Registration: Full Registration USD $100 Student Registration USD $50 General Chairs: William A. Barrett (Brigham Young University) Michael S. Brown (National University of Singapore) Program Chair: R. Manmatha (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) Organizing Chair: Jake Gehring (Manager, FamilySearch Data Operations, USA) Program Committee: Apostolos Antonacopoulos Josep Lladós Mohamed Cheriet Shijian Lu Xiaoqing Ding Simone Marinai David Doermann Heath Nielson Scott Eldredge Liangrui Peng Basilis Gatos Alexandra Psarrou Venu Govindaraju Eric Ringger C.J. Jawahar Zhixin Shi LianWen Jin Chew Lim Tan George Landon Eugene Walach Cheng-Lin Liu ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: CBDAR 2011 ===================================== Call for Papers Fourth International Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition September 22, 2011 - Beijing, China http://imlab.jp/cbdar2011/ The pervasive use of camera phones and hand-held digital cameras has led the community to acknowledge that document analysis and recognition (DAR) on digital camera images is a promising and growing sub-field. Constraints imposed by the memory, processing speed and image quality of these devices are leading to new interesting problems to be addressed. Following the success of the first three CBDAR workshops in 2005 (Seoul, Korea), 2007 (Curitiba, Brazil), and 2009 (Barcelona, Spain), CBDAR2011 will be held in Beijing, China as a satellite workshop of ICDAR2011. The aim is to bring together researchers to present cutting edge issues and techniques and contribute to discussions on future research directions. CBDAR will be a 100% participation, one-day, single-track workshop featuring keynote talks, oral/poster presentations, a demo session, and a discussion group. Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to: camera based acquisition restoration of camera captured documents (dewarping, deblurring, etc.) image degradation models for camera captured characters/documents document image quality analysis character segmentation / recognition from scene images layout analysis for camera captured documents video of text / text in video document image retrieval devices and algorithms for camera-based document analysis and recognition device constrained techniques and algorithms performance evaluation and metrics applications such as translation, reading text for the blind, etc. Important Dates (Tentative): Paper submission due: June 15, 2011 Author Notification: July 15, 2011 Camera-ready paper due: August 01, 2011 Co-Chairs: Masakazu Iwamura, Osaka Prefecture Univ., Japan Faisal Shafait, DFKI, Germany ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: AFHA 2011 ===================================== CALL FOR PAPERS 1st Int. Workshop and Tutorial on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis In conjunction with 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) September 17-18, 2011, Beijing, China We are pleased to announce the 1st Int. Workshop and Tutorial on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis to be held as a satellite workshop of the ICDAR 2011 in Beijing, China during September 17-18, 2011. The AFHA 2011 is a novel approach and brings together researchers in the field of automated handwriting analysis and signature verification and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. It is organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorial. On the first day, an introductory tutorial on forensic handwriting examination will be given. This includes a description of the forensics point of view and examples of real casework as well as a summary of important approaches in the area of automated handwriting examination. On the second day, a workshop about recent research activities will be held. First, Participants with accepted report papers will get the opportunity to talk about their research. Subsequently, in a panel discussion session, all participants will be able to state their points of view and discuss together about selected topics of the community. Every registration is for the combined workshop/tutorial. We encourage the participants to submit reports (up to 5 pages, IEEE format) on ongoing research as well as papers on novel directions in the following fields: * Forensic handwriting verification/identification * Forensic signature verification/identification * Strength of evidence: Bayesian statistics/networks * Within writer versus between writer variations * Determining the frequency of occurrence of handwriting features * Automated signature identification and verification * Automated handwriting identification and verification * Extraction of movement order features out of the ink trace * Expert results vs. system outputs * Allograph matching and clustering * Classification of signatures: legible vs. illegible, complex vs. simple * Taxonomy of features The proceedings will be made available electronically as Open Access on the web before the workshop starts. Important Dates paper submission: June 15, 2011 acceptance notification: July 15, 2011 camera-ready submission: August 15, 2011 Website http://forensic.to/webhome/afha/ Workshop Chairs Marcus Liwicki, DFKI Michael Blumenstein, Griffith U Elisa van den Heuvel, NFI Bryan Found, La Trobe U Charles Berger, NFI Reinoud Stoel , NFI Program Committee (tentative) Xioahong Chen, China Mohamed Cheriet, U Québec Miguel Ferrer, ULPGC Julian Fierrez, U A Madrid Katrin Franke, NIS Labs Zeno Geradts, NFI Muhammad T. Ibrahim, Ryerson U Muhammad I. Malik, DFKI Angelo Marcelli, U Salerno Takashi Matsumoto, Waseda U Loris Nanni, U Bologna Javier Ortega-Garcia, U A Madrid Giuseppe Pirlo, U Bari Réjean Plamondon, E P Montreal Sargur N. Srihari, U Buffalo The AFHA 2011 is sponsored by Signature & Handwriting Forensics PTY LTD ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: KAIST Scene Text Dataset ========================== A new dataset, the "KAIST Scene Text Dataset" has been added to the TC-11 hosted datasets. Please check it out here: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/KAIST_Scene_Text_Database The KAIST dataset comprises 3000 images containing text captured in different environments, including outdoors and indoors scenes under different lighting conditions. Many thanks to the KAIST group for the contribution. One of the goals of TC-11 is to make the TC-11 Web site into a useful repository for material related to Document Analysis research. Over the last year 7 new datasets along with corresponding ground truth information have been added to the TC-11 site, bringing the total number of datasets hosted or linked to 18. A series of "research tasks" have been defined in relation to the TC-11 datasets. The tasks correspond to open challenges in the field. A task would typically provide a specific evaluation protocol, and link to specific resources as required (a dataset, and usually related ground truth data). If you decide to undertake any of these tasks and you have published results or code available, we would really like to know! The TC-11 is continually looking for new material. If you think you can contribute a dataset, ground truth, code or results, please contact Dimosthenis Karatzas, the TC-11 dataset curator (dimos@cvc.uab.es). The current list of available datasets can be found here: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets ============================================================================ ========== Job Opportunities =============================================== Open PhD positions in the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis group (DAG) is formed by 15 researchers from different countries, specifically devoted to research and development of pattern recognition and computer vision techniques applied to document analysis. More information on the group can be found at http://dag.cvc.uab.es. The group opens PhD positions in any of the research areas of the group, including graphics recognition, analysis of historical documents, categorization, indexing and retrieval of documents, shape recognition, handwriting analysis, and syntactic and structural pattern recognition. Successful candidates will become doctoral students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The scholarship is given for a maximum of 4 years provided successful progress. It includes a master degree on Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence during the first year and should lead to a final PhD dissertation. The candidate must perform high quality research leading to the publication of papers in well-known international conferences and journals with high impact factor. Qualifications and skills required: * Bachelor degree in Computer Science or a related field such as electrical, telecommunications engineering, Mathematics or Physics. * Good mathematical understanding. * High motivation for research. * Capability of working in an autonomous way. * Good programming skills in C++ and Matlab. * Good communication skills in English, both in written and oral form. * Learning or Pattern Recognition techniques will be an asset. Applicants should submit: 1) Application letter 2) Curriculum Vitae and Academic Record 3) Letters of Reference (if available) Send required information to: Ernest Valveny: ernest@cvc.uab.es Campus UAB, Edifici O 08193, Bellaterra Barcelona, Spain Tel. +34 93 581 1863 Fax +34 93 581 1670 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internship at Xerox Research Centre Europe, France: Automatic Form Model Generation Automatic Form Processing consists in extracting useful information from forms filled in by hand or machine. This task is generally composed of two steps: form categorization and information extraction. The first step, form categorization, requires a set of known form templates. The goal of these templates is to guide the information extraction step by selecting zones of interest in the form on which Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is performed. This internship aims at investigating and developing methods for automatically inferring rich form templates. We will suppose, alike existing techniques, that OCR is systematically applied to forms. Template inference will then be based on information provided by OCR. Rich templates will describe forms by combining geometrical and content information. The goal of the geometrical and content constraints is to guide the information extraction step (by providing location and content type information). The investigated methods will rely on unsupervised techniques (no annotated data). Objectives of this internship: * Collect of relevant literature * Design of algorithms for template inference (unsupervised methods) * Implementation of a prototype The candidate must have interest in research and exploratory work. Good programming skills are required. Duration: 6 months Start Date: Spring 2011 Location: Xerox Research Centre Europe, France Contact: Hervé Déjean (herve.dejean@xrce.xerox.com) http://www.xrce.xerox.com/About-XRCE/Internships/Automatic-Form-Model-Generation ============================================================================ ========== 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 conferences 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. ============================================================================ ========== Subscription Information ======================================== This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To manage your subscription, please visit the mailing list homepage at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11 The homepage for IAPR TC11 is http://www.iapr-tc11.org ============================================================================