============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter May 2014 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ACCV 2014, Singapore June 20 * New and Recently Published Datasets * Call for Papers - Document Recognition and Retrieval XXII (DRR 2015), San Francisco, February 11-12, 2015 - 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading, Singapore, November 1/2, 2014 (in conjunction with ACCV 2014) * Job Advertisement - PostDoc at Osaka Prefecture University (repost) * Call for Papers: IJDAR Special Issue on Robust Reading (repost) * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the May edition of our TC-11 newsletter. This edition brings to you the Calls for Papers for the 22nd conference on Document Recognition and Retrieval which will be held in San Francisco in February 2015 and for the First International Workshop on Robust Reading that will be held in November 2014 in Singapore in conjunction with ACCV 2014. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ACCV 2014, Singapore November 1-5 June 20 (http://www.accv2014.org/) * DRR 2015, San Francisco, USA February 11-12, 2015 July 14 (http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015) * IWRR 2014, Singapore November 1 or 2 September 12 (http://imlab.jp/iwrr2014/) * CVPR 2015, Bosten, United States June 8-10, 2015 November 14 (http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/) * IDIPS 2014, Fourni Island, Greece May 26-30 - passed - (http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2014/) * IWCF 2014, Stockholm, Sweden August 24 - passed - (http://www.isical.ac.in/~iwcf2014) * ICPR 2014, Stockholm, Sweden August 24-28 - passed - (http://www.icpr2014.org/) * ICFHR 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece September 1-4 - passed - (http://www.icfhr2014.org/) * BMVC 2014, Nottingham, UK September 1-5 - passed - (http://bmvc2014.cs.nott.ac.uk/) * GCPR 2014, Mu"nster, Germany September 2-5 - passed - http://cvpr.uni-muenster.de/GCPR2014/ ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== Dataset: Main Purpose: Published: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * CROHME Recognition of Online HW Math Expressions 2/2014 (more than 10k expressions from 100s of writers) http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/CROHME:_Competition_on_Recogntion_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: DRR 2015 ======================================= CALL FOR PAPERS --------------------------------------------------- Document Recognition and Retrieval XXII (DRR 2015) --------------------------------------------------- http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015 San Francisco, February 11-12, 2015 Document Recognition and Retrieval (DRR) is one of the leading international conferences devoted to current research in document analysis, recognition and retrieval. The 22nd Document Recognition and Retrieval Conference is being held as part of the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposium taking place in San Francisco, California, USA. The conference venue and hotel will be the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. DRR specifically will take place February 11-12, 2015. The Conference Chairs and Program Committee invite all researchers working on document recognition and retrieval to submit original research papers. Papers are presented in oral and poster sessions at the conference, along with invited talks by leading researchers. Accepted papers will be published by the SPIE in the conference proceedings. Papers will also be indexed by DBLP. At the conference a Best Student Paper Award will be presented. Papers are solicited in, but not limited to, the areas below. (Conference web page: http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015) DOCUMENT RECOGNITION * Text recognition: machine-printed documents, handwritten documents; paper, tablet, camera, and video sources * Writer/style identification, verification, and adaptation * Graphics recognition: vectorization (e.g. for line-art, maps and technical drawings), signature, logo and graphical symbol recognition, figure, chart and graph recognition, and diagrammatic notations (e.g. music, mathematical notation) * Document layout analysis and understanding: document and page region segmentation, form and table recognition, and document understanding through combined modalities (e.g. speech and images) * Evaluation: performance metrics, document degradation models, data collection, benchmarking, ground-truthing * Additional topics: document image filtering, enhancement and compression, document clustering and classification, machine learning (e.g. integration and optimization of recognition modules), historical and degraded document images (e.g. fax), multilingual document recognition, and web page analysis (including wikis and blogs). DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL * Indexing and summarization: text documents (messages, blogs, etc.), imaged documents, entity tagging from OCR output, and text categorization * Query languages and modalities: content-based image retrieval (CBIR) for documents, keyword spotting, non-textual query-by-example (e.g. tables, figures, math), querying by document geometry and/or logical structure, approximate string matching algorithms for OCR output, retrieval of noisy text documents (messages, blogs, etc.), cross and multi-lingual retrieval * Discovery and browsing: pattern discovery, trend mining, topic modeling and analysis, clustering * Evaluation: relevance and performance metrics, evaluation protocols, and benchmarking * Additional topics: relevance feedback, impact of recognition accuracy on retrieval performance, and digital libraries including systems engineering and quality assurance. IMPORTANT DATES * 14 July 2014, 11:59pm PST: Submission deadline: Full Paper for Review * 7 October 2014: Author notifications * 1 December 2014: Submission deadline: Manuscript for On-site Proceedings * 11-12 February 2015: Conference PAPER SUBMISSION Standard minimum paper length for all SPIE events is 6 pages. However, for DRR, we strongly encourage the authors to submit longer papers (ideally 8-12 pages). The review process will take into account both the quality and the depth of development of the scientific and experimental content of a paper. Papers should clearly identify the problem addressed in the work, identify the original contribution(s) of the paper, relate the paper to previous work, justify and document the methods of the paper, and provide substantive experimental and/or theoretical evaluation. The program committee will favor papers that take advantage of the opportunity to develop, argue, and provide compelling experimental evidence. We recommend using the SPIE LaTeX template for preparing submissions (http://kmh-lanl.hansonhub.com/spie/). Submissions should be uploaded through the SPIE conference website (http://spie.org). For accepted submissions, the final manuscripts to be published in the proceedings are expected also to be a minimum of 6 pages in the same format. For more information visit http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015 . Questions concerning the conference may also be addressed to: drr2015@googlegroups.com CONFERENCE CHAIRS * Eric K. Ringger, Brigham Young Univ. (United States) * Bart Lamiroy, Universite' de Lorraine & LORIA (France) PROGRAM COMMITTEE * Gady Agam, Illinois Institute of Technology (United States) * Sameer K. Antani, National Library of Medicine (United States) * Elisa H. Barney Smith, Boise State Univ. (United States) * William A. Barrett, Brigham Young Univ. (United States) * Kathrin Berkner, Ricoh Innovations, Inc. (United States) * Bertrand Cou"asnon, Institut National des Sciences Applique'es de Rennes (France) * Herve' De'jean, Xerox Research Ctr. Europe Grenoble (France) * Xiaoqing Ding, Tsinghua Univ. (China) * David S. Doermann, Univ. of Maryland, College Park (United States) * Jianying Hu, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Ctr. (United States) * Ergina Kavallieratou, Univ. of the Aegean (Greece) * Christopher Kermorvant, A2iA SA (France) * Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Telecom ParisTech (France) * Xiaofan Lin, A9.com, Inc. (United States) * Marcus Liwicki, Deutsches Forschungszentrum fu"r Ku"nstliche Intelligenz GmbH (Germany) * Daniel P. Lopresti, Lehigh Univ. (United States) * Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute (India) * Sargur N. Srihari, Univ. at Buffalo (United States) * Venkata Subramaniam, IBM India Research Lab. (India) * Kazem Taghva, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas (United States) * George R. Thoma, National Library of Medicine (United States) * Christian Viard-Gaudin, Univ. de Nantes (France) * Berrin Yanikoglu, Sabanci Univ. (Turkey) * Pingping Xiu, Microsoft (United States) * Richard Zanibbi, Rochester Institute of Technology (United States) * Jie Zou, National Library of Medicine (United States) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: IWRR 2014 ====================================== First International Workshop on Robust Reading (in conjunction with ACCV 2014) ----------------------------------------------- November 1 or 2, 2014 National University of Singapore, Singapore Web: http://imlab.jp/iwrr2014/ Interpreting written communication (textual or symbolic) is one of the most important human activities. It is, however, one of the most difficult ones for computers to realize and has been recognized as an unsolved challenge. In the community of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR), research on unconstrained reading systems has been of central interest. The series of ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), which is held in conjunction with biannual International Conference of Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), has played an important role, especially, by providing standardized datasets that have become the de-facto evaluation benchmarks in the area and providing an opportunity to compare methods. Recently, this kind of research, especially research on reading scene text, has attracted the interest and is increasingly accepted by the wider computer vision (CV) community. Papers on related topics have been consistently presented in major CV conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and ACCV. In these papers, ICDAR RRC datasets are used as standard measures of methods. Responding to this trend, we organize the First International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR 2014) in conjunction with ACCV 2014. The workshop aims at turning the spotlight on the challenge of unconstrained reading systems. The goal of the workshop is to attract the wider CV community to put research efforts on this challenging research topic, as well as to motivate many researchers from the DAR community to attend ACCV 2014. Topics of Interest --------------------------- Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - Scene text localisation, segmentation, and recognition - Reading scene and/or overlaid text in video sequences - Text localisation, segmentation, and recognition in born-digital images - Restoration of camera captured documents (dewarping, deblurring, etc.) - Quality estimation and degradation modelling of camera-captured text - Performance evaluation and metrics - Applications such as translation, reading text for the blind, etc - Graphical content interpretation in complex settings Submission and Publication --------------------------- The workshop organizers welcome technical papers with novel, thought-provoking work and ideas relating to the workshop topics. All submissions must be formatted in ACCV 2014 format and contain original work that is not being published or under review elsewhere. Each submission will undergo a double-blind reviewing process. All accepted papers will be published online on the workshop website. More information can be found on the workshop website. Important Dates --------------------------- Paper submission due: September 12, 2014 Author Notification: October 3, 2014 Camera-ready paper due: October 17, 2014 Co-Chairs --------------------------- Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture Univ., Japan) Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Centre, Spain) Faisal Shafait (Univ. of Western Australia, Australia) Pramod Sankar Kompalli (Xerox Research India, India) Program Committee --------------------------- Alessandro Bissacco (Google, USA) Sergi Belongie (Cornell University, USA) Erik Learned-Miller (Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, USA) Raghavan Manmatha (Amazon.com, USA) Jiri Matas (Czech Technical University, Czech Republic) Ajmal Saeed Mian (Univ. of Western Australia, Australia) Ray Smith (Google, USA) Palaiahnakote Shivakumara (National University of Malaya, Malaysia) Jun Sun (Fujitsu R&D China, China) Phan Quy Trung (Univ. of Massachusetts / National Univ. of Singapore, Singapore) Seiichi Uchida (Kyushu Univ., Japan) Kai Wang (Google, USA) Jerod J. Weinman (Grinnell College, USA) Inquiries: iwrr2014-inquiry@ml.osakafu-u.ac.jp ============================================================================ ========== Job Advertisement: PostDoc in Osaka ============================= A position of postdoc researcher, research assistant or associate professor in Osaka, Japan: 1. Project The position is for a CREST project entitled "Development of Fundamental Technologies for Innovative Use of Character/Document Media and Their Application to Creating Human Harmonized Information Environment". http://www.u-pat.org/CREST/index-e.shtml 2. Position A position of postdoc or research assistant professor / associate professor is available at Osaka Prefecture University, which may be modified upon request. 3. Period of employment One year, which can be extended every year until March 2016 based on the evaluation. 4. Eligibility Applicants should have had or expect to have a Ph.D degree in computer science or other related areas. We are looking for applicants who have experiences in human computer interaction, pattern recognition and computer vision, and/or who can work on a research on understanding a person through reading activity analysis. The programming skill of C/C++ is necessary to do the research. 5. Place of work Osaka Prefecture University 1-1 Gakuencho, Naka, Sakai, Osaka, 599-8531, Japan 6. Salary It is about 6.5 million JPY for one year (46k EUR / 65K USD), though it depends on the experience and achievements of an applicant. 7. Closing date of application 2 June, 2014. 8. Documents to be submitted (1) CV (picture of the applicant, contact address and phone number, email, academic and employment records, reward and punishment) (2) List of publications (journal papers, conference papers, books, patents) (3) Reprints of representative papers (up to three) (4) Summary of research experiences and future directions (in total up to 3 pages) (5) Letters of recommendations (from two persons) 9. Address to send the documents Please send the above documents to: Prof. Koichi Kise kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp via email. The maximum size is 5MB. ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: IJDAR Special Issue on Robust Reading ========== Special Issue on Robust Reading - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition Aims and Scope ------------------------ Document Image Analysis (DIA) was established to address the need for the automated analysis of scanned paper documents, but has evolved to incorporate a great variety of text containers including digital-born (Web and email) images, scene images, and video sequences. These types of text containers introduce a range of new challenges for document image analysis, stemming from perspective distortions, a large variety of fonts and backgrounds, anti-aliasing, and compression artefacts. Addressing the need of reading textual content in such domains entails a paradigm shift in the document analysis field that calls for a change in the definition of "document" to include complex unconstrained text containers, as opposed to the traditional scanned paper document. The IJDAR Special Issue on Robust Reading invites original work on topics related to the detection, extraction and recognition of textual content in such complex unconstrained text containers. Topics of Interest ------------------------ The list of topics includes but is not limited to: - Scene text localisation, segmentation, and recognition - Reading scene and/or overlaid text in video sequences - Text localisation, segmentation, and recognition in born-digital images - Restoration of camera captured documents (dewarping, deblurring, etc.) - Quality estimation and degradation modelling of camera-captured text - Performance evaluation and metrics - Applications such as translation, reading text for the blind, etc - Graphical content interpretation in complex settings Submission Process ------------------------ Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals. All submissions will be peer reviewed subject to the standards of the journal. Manuscripts based on previously published conference papers must be extended substantially. Manuscripts should be submitted to: http://www.editorialmanager.com/ijda/. All submissions are strictly limited to 15 pages in IJDAR format. Detailed instructions are available on the IJDAR website. Please select "S.I.: Robust Reading" in the menu "Choose Article Type" after clicking on "Submit new manuscript". The submission site will open on 1st May, 2014. Important Dates ------------------------ Paper submission (hard deadline) 01 Jun 2014 First notifications 01 Aug 2014 Submission of revised papers 01 Oct 2014 Acceptance notifications 01 Nov 2014 Camera ready papers due 15 Nov 2014 Issue published Mar 2015 Guest Editors ------------------------ Faisal Shafait, The University of Western Australia, Australia (faisal.shafait@uwa.edu.au) Dimosthenis Karatzas, Computer Vision Centre, Spain (dimos@cvc.uab.es) Seiichi Uchida, Kyushu University, Japan (uchida@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp) Masakazu Iwamura, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan (masa@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp) ============================================================================ ========== 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 Marcus Liwicki, the TC11 dataset curator, for any doubts you might have on the process. Marcus Liwicki, TC-11 Dataset Curator liwicki@dfki.uni-kl.de ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================