============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter October 2011 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICFHR 2012, Bari, Italy, February 28, 2012 * Report: - International Conference on Document Analysis (ICDAR) 2011, Beijing * Call for Datasets * Announcements: - ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition is now run "continuously" - Preliminary program for DRR 2012 available * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the October edition of our TC-11 newsletter. This edition brings to you a report on this year's ICDAR, a Call for Datasets by the TC-11 Dataset Curator and two announcement (ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition switched to "continuous mode", Preliminary program for DRR 2012 available). Additionally, I would like to draw your attention to a survey on the important question of "When is a Problem Solved?" raised by Dan Lopresti and George Nagy in their ICDAR presentation, the slides for which can be found at: http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~lopresti/Talks/2011/ICDAR11_ProblemSolved.pdf As it would be good to see the opinions from the TC-11 community on this interesting problem, I would like to ask you to fill out the associated survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H3XHKPT The results of the survey will be included in a revised version of the presentation slides on Daniel Lopresti's website, which will announced in a future edition of this newsletter. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICFHR 2012, Bari, Italy September 18-20, 2012 February 28 (http://www.icfhr2012.uniba.it) * ICPR 2012, Tsukuba, Japan November 11-15, 2012 March 31 (http://www.icpr2012.org) ============================================================================ ========== Report: ICDAR 2011 ============================================== The 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2011) was held at the Beijing Friendship Hotel, Beijing, China, on September 18-21, 2011. ICDAR is the major event sponsored by the IAPR Technical Committees TC-10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC-11 (Reading Systems). The ICDAR 2011 was co-hosted by the Tsinghua University and the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It attracted the participation of 387 registrants, including 88 delegates from the industry. Based on a rigorous review process, 90 oral papers were presented along with 188 poster papers. In addition to the regular paper sessions, there were five plenary sessions (an award session, three invited keynote speeches, a panel discussion) and three parallel competition sessions. Prof. Sargur Srihari (University of Buffalo, SUNY) received the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award of 2011. He gave a speech titled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning" at the award session following the opening ceremony. Three keynote speeches were given by Prof. Henry Baird (Document Recognition without Strong Models), Prof. Wen Xing (Chinese Paleography, Calligraphy and Pattern Recognition: Styles and Scripts in Excavated Ancient Chinese Documents), and Marc Wilhelm Küster (The Four and a Half Challenges of Humanities Data). The panel discussion invited five professors (led by Prof. Ching Suen) to present progresses and prospects of font design, evaluation, and applications in digital publishing and display. At the banquet, the chair of TC-10 presented the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award to Dr. Masakazu Iwamura (Japan). The chair of TC-11 announced the winner of ICDAR 2015 host bidding: Tunis, Tunisia. At the closing ceremony, four paper awards were announced and the recipient authors were presented certificates and prizes. The awarded papers are: * IAPR Best Paper Award: Marçal Rusiñol, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo and Josep Llados, Browsing Heterogeneous Document Collections by a Segmentation-free Word Spotting Method * IAPR Best Poster Award: Da-Han Wang and Cheng-Lin Liu, Dynamic Text Line Segmentation for Real-Time Recognition of Chinese Handwritten Sentences * ITESOFT Best Student Paper Award: Adam Coates, Blake Carpenter, Carl Case, Sanjeev Satheesh, Bipin Suresh, Tao Wang and Andrew Ng, Text Detection and Character Recognition in Scene Images with Unsupervised Feature Learning * Nuance Best Industrial Paper Award: Ray Smith, Limits on the Application of Frequency-based Language Models to OCR In addition to the main conference, four satellite workshops were held in conjunction with ICDAR 2011, along with the first-ever Doctoral Consortium where 21 doctoral students presented their research, supported by 19 mentors who are established researchers in the field. (by Cheng-Lin Liu, ICDAR 2011 Executive Co-Chair) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Datasets =============================================== We would like to remind you that the TC10 and TC11 Web sites always welcome contributions of new datasets or other resources related to the community. We would like to encourage all the TC11 members to submit such material to the TC11 for archiving. The availability of datasets, ground truth and performance evaluation tools online is not only good practice, but also a requirement for a field to progress. We would like to make a special request to the organizers of recent competitions (e.g. during ICDAR 2011 alone we had 16 competitions organized). Independently of whether you have the competition datasets and evaluation tools available through the competition Web site, please consider archiving them with TC10 / TC11 as well. Web sites often go off-line and useful resources are frequently lost forever. Please check the TC11 site on information about how to submit datasets for archiving. http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets (by Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Dataset Curator) ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition ============= ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 1) has now entered a "Continuous Mode" We are pleased to announce you that the "ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition - Challenge 1: Reading Text from Born-digital Images (Web and Email)" has entered what we call a "continuous mode" since the beginning of October. This means that you can upload new results when you have them, for any of the three tasks. http://www.cvc.uab.es/icdar2011competition Performance evaluation metrics will be calculated online as soon as you upload new results, giving you the ability to compare directly with already submitted results without having to re-implement our performance evaluation methodology from scratch. You can decide whether newly submitted results are private (just for your own use while you are testing new algorithms) or public (other people can also see and compare against your results). Feel free to explore this new functionality, and let us know if you spot any problems or you have any suggestions on how to improve this. In the meanwhile you can find the ICDAR 2011 report and presentation on the Web site. (by Dimosthenis Karatzas) ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: Preliminary Program for DRR 2012 ================== The 19th SPIE Document and Recognition Retrieval Conference will be held in San Francisco between January 25th and 26th, 2012. Papers at the conference describe recent advances in document image processing and layout analysis, handwriting recognition, graphics recognition (e.g. for tables, chemical diagrams, and math), human factors in system training and deployment, and retrieval using document images and graphical objects. The keynote speakers will be Samy Bengio (Google) and Christopher Manning (Stanford University). The preliminary conference program can be found here: http://spie.org/app/program/index.cfm?fuseaction=conferencedetail&export_id=x16280&ID=x16223&redir=x16223.xml&conference_id=959716&event_id=956859&programtrack_id=956862 (provided by Richard Zanibbi) ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================