============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter February 2013 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICDAR 2013, Washington, USA February 22 (update only!) * New and Recently Published Datasets * Calls for Papers: - 2nd Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA) 2013 * Call for Participation: - DIBCO 2013 - Document Image Binarization Contest - International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS) 2013 * Announcements: - ICDAR 2013 Doctoral Consortium: Your reaction is needed! - ICDAR 2013 Competitions (Complete List) - ICDAR 2013 Satelite Workshops * Call for Nominations: ICDAR 2013 Awards (repost) * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the February edition of our TC11 newsletter. This edition brings to you the Call for Papers for the 2nd Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA) 2013, the Call for Participation for the Document Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO) 2013, the International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS) 2013, as well as an overview of the complete set of contests and workshops organized in conjunction with ICDAR 2013. Furthermore, I would like to again draw your attention to the Call for Nominations for this year's ICDAR Awards and to a community survey concerning your active participation in the ICDAR Doctoral Consortium. Please take a few minutes to anwser the poll that can be found here: doodle.com/m25zywknn9epvr6k Finally, I would like to remind all prospective ICDAR authors that the deadline for updating your pre-submitted manuscripts ends this Friday, February 22nd. Please also note that no new submissions to ICDAR are possible any more. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICDAR 2013, Washington, USA August 25-28 (February 1) (http://www.icdar2013.org/) February 22 - Doctoral Consortium: August 25 May 25 * IDIPS 2013, Fourni, Greece June 3-7 March 1 (http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2013/) * GREC 2013, Bethlehem, PA, USA August 20-21 March 31 (http://grec2013.loria.fr/GREC2013/) (April 8) * DocEng 2013, Florence, Italy September 10-13 March 31 (http://www.doceng2013.org) (April 7) * AFHA 2013 in conjunction with ICDAR August 23-24 May 15 (http://www.dfki.de/afha/2013/index.html) * CBDAR 2013 in conjunction with ICDAR August 23 May 15 (http://imlab.jp/cbdar2013/) * HIP 2013 in conjunction with ICDAR August 24 May 15 (http://www.cvc.uab.es/~vfrinken/HIP2013) * OpenHaRT 2013 conjunction with ICDAR August 23 May 15 (http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/hart2013.cfm) * MOCR 2013 conjunction with ICDAR August 24 May 15 (http://www.cubs.buffalo.edu/MOCR2013/) * ACPR 2013, Okinawa, Japan November 5-8 June 10 (http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/ACPR2013/) ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== Name/Source of Dataset: Main Purpose: Published: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * MSRA 500 Database Text Detection 11/2012 http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/MSRA_Text_Detection_500_Database_(MSRA-TD500) * CROHME Recognition of Online 11/2012 HW Math Expressions http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/CROHME:_Competition_on_Recognition_of_Online_Handwritten_Mathematical_Expressions For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: AFHA 2013 ====================================== Welcome to the 2nd Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis We are pleased to announce the 2nd International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis to be held as a satellite workshop of the ICDAR 2013 in Washington DC, USA during August 23-24, 2013. The AFHA 2013 will continue the approach of bringing together researchers in the field of automated handwriting analysis and signature verification and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. It will be organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorial similar to the AFHA 2011 which attracted more than 30 participants. 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. In this tutorial we will give insights into the daily work to be performed by professional FHEs and give examples for their case-work. Furthermore, we will give an overview on the work done in the pattern recognition area and a comparison of state-of-the-art automatic verification systems. In the second half we will introduce two automatic approaches for off-line and on-line signature verification with more detail and explain all the processing steps. Additionally, we will provide parts of these systems as a starting point for the development of identification systems for the participants. Note that there have been tutorials in 2011 and 2012, but every time, we cover new aspects and due to the discussions the tutorials have been interesting to regular attendees as well. 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. This unique combination of tutorial and workshop will be beneficial for newcomers in this field, as well as for persons who have interesting ongoing research results and want to discuss about them and other topics in a broad group consisting of experts from the document analysis field as well as experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. Every registration is for the combined workshop/tutorial. Coverage of Topics 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: May 15, 2013 Acceptance Notification: June 15, 2013 Camera-ready Submission: July 15, 2013 Workshop Chairs Marcus Liwicki Bryan Found Reinoud Stoel Charles Berger Linda Alewijnse Michael Blumenstein Muhammad Imran Malik ============================================================================ ========== Call for Participation: DIBCO 2013 ============================= CALL FOR PARTICIPATION DIBCO 2013 - Document Image Binarization Contest in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'13), August 25-28, 2013, Washington, DC. http://utopia.duth.gr/~ipratika/DIBCO2013/ Document image binarization is an important step in the document image analysis and recognition pipeline. In this respect, it is imperative to have a benchmarking dataset along with an objective evaluation methodology to capture the efficiency of current document image binarization methodologies. Following the success of DIBCO series (DIBCO 2009 organised in conjunction with ICDAR'09, H-DIBCO 2010 organized in conjunction with ICFHR 2010, DIBCO 2011 organised in conjunction with ICDAR'11 and H-DIBCO 2012 organized in conjunction with ICFHR 2012) the follow-up of this contest aims to be organised in conjuction with ICDAR 2013. In DIBCO 2013, the general objective is to record recent advances in document image binarization using established evaluation performance measures. The benchmarking dataset that will be used in the contest will augment the existing dataset of the DIBCO series containing both machine printed and handwritten document images that are representative of the potential problems which are challenging in the binarization process. All researchers in the field of Document Image Binarization are invited to register for participating in DIBCO 2013. An agreement will be signed by the participants and the organizers in order to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the submitted software. The description of the methods and the evaluation scores will be presented during a dedicated ICDAR 2013 session. A report on the competition will be published in the ICDAR 2013 conference proceedings. At the end of the competition, the testing dataset along with the required program to run the evaluation measures will become publicly available. NOTE : You may participate in this contest even if you do not plan to attend the ICDAR 2013 conference. Important Dates Registration is open due to 29/3/2013 Submission of executable due to 1/4/2013 The DIBCO 2013 Organizing Committee I. Pratikakis(1), B. Gatos(2) and K. Ntirogiannis(2) (1) Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (2) National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Greece ============================================================================ ========== Call for Participation: IDIPS 2013 ============================= The first Summer School on Document Image Processing, that takes place on the Greek island of Fourni, aims to provide both an objective overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art of this research field and its current open issues. The courses will be delivered by known researchers of the field like Antonacopoulos, LLados, Lopresti, etc. covering both theoretical and practical aspects of real problems of Document Image Processing, as well as examples of successful applications. The Summer School registration (400 Euro) will cover attendance, proceedings, accommodation, dinners, coffee breaks, social events and transfer from Samos airport and back, while all the paper will be published in the proceedings and made free avaiable on line. Four participants will receive scholarships that will cover the registration fee. The fellows will be selected according to their performance in the School. Moreover, awards will be given to the best oral and poster presentations. Application: 1 March 2013 Paper Submission: 1 March 2013 http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2013/ thank you in advance Ergina Kavallieratou ============================================================================ ========== ICDAR 2013 Doctoral Consortium: Your reaction is needed! ======== After the great success at ICDAR 2011, the leadership of IAPR TC-10/TC-11 plans to continue organizing a Doctoral Consortium in conjunction with ICDAR 2013. It will be jointly organized by Marcus Liwicki and Josep Llados. More information below. If you are willing to participate as a student or if you are able to mentor a PhD-student, please tick one of the options in the following poll (This poll is not the definite registration yet, but it helps us in the organization): doodle.com/m25zywknn9epvr6k The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to create an opportunity for Ph.D. students to test their research ideas, present their current progress and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and insights related to their future work and career perspectives. A mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback. In addition, students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during a special poster session. Participation in the IAPR TC-10/11 Doctoral Consortium will be by invitation only and will be limited to 25 students. Students willing to participate will submit their application around May (deadline and submission information will be announced in February). Preference will be given to students who are at a stage in their studies most likely to benefit (i.e., they have identified a research direction and published some initial results, but the thesis is not yet "cast in stone"). The event will be designed so that the extra expense is minimal for all involved. The Doctoral Consortium will take place the day before ICDAR (August 25). The tentative important dates are: Submission deadline: May 25 Acceptance notification and Mentor assignment: June 10 Final material due: July 25 Doctoral Consortium: August 25 We are looking forward to your participation! Marcus Liwicki & Josep Llados ICDAR 2013 Doctoral Consortium Organization Team ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: ICDAR 2013 Competitions ========================== ICDAR 2013 is pleased to announce a number of exciting competitions that cover a broad range of topics of interest to the document analysis community. The list of competitions and their websites are listed below. Please visit: icdar2013.org/program/competitions for more information. 1 Chinese Handwriting Recognition Competition http://www.nlpr.ia.ac.cn/events/CHRcompetition2013/competition/Home.html Organizers: Fei Yin, Qiu-Feng Wang and Cheng-Lin Liu 2 Robust Reading Competition http://dag.cvc.uab.es/icdar2013competition/ Organizers: Dimosthenis Karatzas, Faisal Shafait, Masakazu Iwamura, and Seiichi Uchida 3 Writer Identification Contest http://users.iit.demokritos.gr/~louloud/ICDAR2013WriterIdentificationComp/ Organizers: Georgios Louloudis, Basilis Gatos, Nikolaos Stamatopoulos, and Alexandros Papandreou 4 Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME) http://www.isical.ac.in/~crohme/index.html Organizers: Dae Hwan Kim, Jin Hyung Kim, Harold Mouchère, Christian Viard-Gaudin, Utpal Garain, and Richard Zanibbi 5 Competition on Table Detection and Structure Recognition in Natively Digital PDF Documents http://www.tamirhassan.com/competition/ Organizers: Max Göbel, Tamir Hassan, Ermelinda Oro and Giorgio Orsi 6 Recognition of Handwritten Historical Texts Competition Organizers: Carlos-D. Martinez-Hinarejos 7 Book Structure Extraction Competition http://users.info.unicaen.fr/~doucet/StructureExtraction/2013/ Organizers: Antoine Doucet, Gabriella Kazai and Günter Mühlberger 8 Handwriting Segmentation Contest http://users.iit.demokritos.gr/~nstam/ICDAR2013HandSegmCont/ Organizers: Nikolaos Stamatopoulos, Basilis Gatos, Georgios Louloudis, Umapada Pal and Alireza Alaei 9 Document Image Skew Estimation Contest (DISEC'13) http://users.iit.demokritos.gr/~alexpap/DISEC13/ Organizers: Alexandros Papandreou, Basilis Gatos, Georgios Louloudis, and Nikolaos Stamatopoulos 10 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal http://www.cvc.uab.es/cvcmuscima/competition2013/ Organizers: A. Fornés, V. C. Kieu, M. Visani, and N. Journet 11 Multi-script Robust Reading Competition http://www.icdar2013.org/program/competitions# Organizers: Deepak Kumar, M. N. Anil Prasad and A. G. Ramakrishnan 12 Signature Verification and Writer Identification Competitions for On- and Offline Skilled Forgeries (SigWiComp2013) http://www.dfki.de/afha/2013/SigWiComp.html Organizers: Marcus Liwicki, Muhammad Imran Malik, Michael Blumenstein, Bryan Found, Linda Alewijnse and Wataru Ohyama 13 Handwritten Word Spotting Competition (H-WSCO 2013) http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/~bgat/H-WSCO2013 Organizers: Basilis Gatos, Georgios Louloudis, Nikolaos Stamatopoulos, Anastasios Kesidis, Konstantinos Zagoris and Ioannis Pratikakis 14 Document Image Binarization COntest (DIBCO 2013) http://utopia.duth.gr/%7Eipratika/DIBCO2013/ Organizers: Ioannis Pratikakis, Basilis Gatos and Konstantinos Ntirogiannis 15 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text http://diuf.unifr.ch/diva/APTI/competitionICDAR2013.html Organizers: Fouad Slimane, Slim Kanoun, Haikal El Abed, Jean Hennebert, Rolf Ingold and Adel M. Alimi 16 Competition on Gender Prediction from Handwriting http://handwriting.qu.edu.qa/icdar-2013-competitions/gender-prediction/ Organizers: Abdelâali Hassaïne and Somaya Al Maadeed 17 Competition on Stroke Recovery from Offline Data http://handwriting.qu.edu.qa/icdar-2013-competitions/stroke-recovery/ Organizers: Abdelâali Hassaïne and Somaya Al Maadeed 18 On-Line Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition http://oahrc2013.regim.org/ Organizers: Monji Kherallah Najiba.Tagougui, Adel M. Alimi, Haikal El Abed and Volker Märgner 19 Mathematical Formula Identification and Recognition from Born-digital Sources http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/groupings/reasoning/sdag/icdar13-comp/index.html Organizers: Josef Baker, Xiaoyan Lin and Volker Sorge 20 Competition on Historical Book Recognition (HBR2013) http://www.primaresearch.org/HBR2013 Organizers: Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Stefan Pletschacher, Christian Clausner, and Christos Papadopoulos 21 Competition on Historical Newspaper Layout Analysis (HNLA2013) http://www.primaresearch.org/HNLA2013 Organizers: Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Stefan Pletschacher, Christian Clausner, and Christos Papadopoulos 22 Handwritten Digit and Digit String Recognition Competition http://caa.tuwien.ac.at/cvl/research/icdar2013-hdrc/ Organizers: Markus Diem, Stefan Fiel, Angelika Garz, Manuel Keglevic, Florian Kleber and Robert Sablatnig Source: announce@icdar2013.org ICDAR 2013 Secretariat 113 Davis Hall University at Buffalo Buffalo NY 14260-2500 ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: ICDAR 2013 Workshops ========================== ICDAR Workshops =============== Friday, 23 August 2013 ---------------------- - 5th International Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR2013) http://imlab.jp/cbdar2013/ - NIST Open Handwriting Recognition and Translation Evaluation & Workshop (OpenHaRT2013) http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/hart2013.cfm Friday, 23 August and Saturday, 24 August 2013 ---------------------------------------------- - 2nd Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA) 2013 http://www.dfki.de/afha/2013/index.html Saturday, 24 August 2013 ------------------------ - 4th International Workshop on Multilingual OCR (MOCR2013) http://www.cubs.buffalo.edu/MOCR2013/ - 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP2013) http://www.cvc.uab.es/~vfrinken/HIP2013 Satellite Workshops =================== Tuesday-Wednesday, 20-21 August 2013 ------------------------------------ - 10th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2013), Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA http://grec2013.loria.fr/GREC2013/ ============================================================================ ========== Call for Nominations: ICDAR 2013 Awards ======================== ======================================================================== INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DOCUMENT ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION (ICDAR) CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR ICDAR 2013 AWARDS Nominations Due: May 15, 2013 ======================================================================== The ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas: o Research o Training of students o Research/Industry interaction o Service to the profession Every two years, two awards categories are presented. Namely, the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made), and the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award. Each award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievements award will be invited to give the opening key note speech at the ICDAR 2013 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference. Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2013 Awards in both categories. The nomination packet should include the following: 1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate. 2. A brief vitae (2 pages) of the nominee highlighting the accomplishments being recognized. 3. Supporting letters (1 page each) from 3 active researchers from at least 3 different countries. A nomination is usually put forward by a researcher (preferably from a different Institution than the nominee) who is knowledgeable of the scientific achievements of the nominee, and who organizes letters of support. Submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self nominations are not allowed. Please send nominations packets electronically to the Awards Committee Co-Chairs Daniel Lopresti and Jean-Marc Ogier . The deadline for receipt of nominations is May 15th, 2013 but early submissions are strongly encouraged. The final decision will be made by the Awards Committee which is composed of the following members : Daniel Lopresti, USA (Co-Chair) Jean-Marc Ogier, France (Co-Chair) Dave Doermann, USA Masakazu Iwamura, Japan Koichi Kise, Japan Cheng-Lin Liu, China Josep Llados, Spain Umapada Pal, India Sargur Srihari, USA Karl Tombre, France ============================================================================ ========== Call for Dataset Submissions ==================================== We would like to remind you that the TC10 and TC11 welcome contributions of new datasets or other resources related to the community. We would like to particularly encourage authors of articles that introduce new datasets, software or other material to submit such material to TC11 for hosting. Please check the TC11 site on information about how to submit datasets for archiving ( http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets) also feel free to contact Dimosthenis Karatzas, the TC11 dataset curator, for any doubts you might have on the process. Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Dataset Curator dimos@cvc.uab.es ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================