============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter March 2015 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - IDIPS 2015, Kefalonia, Greece March 31 (http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2015) - BTAS 2015, Arlington, Virginia , USA April 1 (http://www.btas2015.org/) * New and Recently Published Datasets * Call for Nominations: ICDAR 2015 Awards * Call for Participation: - International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS) 2015 - ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (repost) [NEW submission deadline: April 2!] * Call for Papers - 4th Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA) 2015 (in conjunction with ICDAR 2015) - 6th Int. Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2015), in conjunction with ICDAR 2015, August 22 (repost) - Special Issue on Pattern Recognition at IEEE Intelligent Systems (repost) * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the March of our newsletter. This edition brings to you the Call for Nominations for this year's ICDAR awards which are the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award and the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award. Furthermore, you will find below the second Call for Participation for the International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS) 2015 and the Call for Papers for the 4th International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA) 2015, which will be held in conjunction with ICDAR 2015. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR TC-11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * IDIPS 2015, Kefalonia, Greece June 21-26 March 31 (http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2015) * BTAS 2015, Arlington, Virginia , USA September 8 - 11 April 1 (http://www.btas2015.org/) * ICCV 2015, Santiago, Chile December 13-16, 2015 April 30 (http://pamitc.org/iccv15/) * ICDAR 2015, Gammarath, Tunisia August 23-26, 2015 - passed - (http://2015.icdar.org/) - Doctoral Consortium: August 23 May 15 * CBDAR 2015 in conjunction with ICDAR August 22 May 15 (http://www.cvc.uab.es/CBDAR2015) * AFHA 2015 in conjunction with ICDAR August 21-22 May 30 (http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/afha2015) * ACPR 2015, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia November 3-6, 2015 June 1 (http://acpr2015.org/) * DAS 2015, Santorini, Greece April 11-14, 2016 TBA (http://www.primaresearch.org/das2016) * CVPR 2015, Boston, United States June 8-10, 2015 - passed - (http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/) ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ============================================================================ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DOCUMENT ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION (ICDAR) CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR ICDAR 2015 AWARDS Nominations Due: May 15, 2015 ============================================================================ 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 2015 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference. Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2015 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 Koichi Kise and Rafael Lins . The deadline for receipt of nominations is May 15th, 2015 but early submissions are strongly encouraged. The final decision will be made by the Awards Committee which is composed of the following members : Koichi Kise, Japan (Co-Chair: TC11) Rafael Lins, Brazil (Co-Chair: TC10) Masakazu Iwamura, Japan Dimosthenis Karatzas, Spain Cheng-Lin Liu, China Josep Llados, Spain Daniel Lopresti, USA Simone Marinai, Italy Jean-Marc Ogier, France Rejean Plamondon, Canada ============================================================================ ========== Call for Participation: IDIPS 2013 ============================= 3rd International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS 2015) 21-26 June 2015, Kefalonian Island, Greece http://samosweb.aegean.gr/idips2015 The 3rd International Document Image Processing Summer School (IDIPS 2015), endorsed by IAPR-TC11 and the Greek branch of IAPR, will be organized this year, on the island of Kefalonia. Once more, the participants will benefit from direct interaction and discussions with the renowned speakers. The researchers will also have the opportunity to present the results of their scientific research, and interact with colleagues in a friendly and constructive atmosphere. In the evening, the participants will have the opportunity to practice in teams under the supervision of several post-doc researchers of the field. Thus, 2 of the post-doc researchers, that will participate to the Summer School, will be selected to join the organizing team and their accommodation expenses on the island will be covered. Finally, 3 companies/libraries/organizations that use or create software of the field, will be invited to participate registration-free in order to give a short lecture on practical problems. INIVITED LECTURERS * Dimosthenis Karatzas , Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain * Efstathios Stamatatos , University of the Aegean, Greece * Elisa H. Barney Smith , Boise State University, USA * Enrique Vidal , Universidad Politècnica de València, Spain * Ergina Kavallieratou , University of the Aegean, Greece * Franck Lebourgeois , INSA de Lyon, France * Jean-Marc Ogier , Université de La Rochelle, France * Seiichi Uchida , Kyushu University, Japan * Umapada Pal , Indian Statistical Institute, India IMPORTANT DATES Application deadline: 31 March 2015 Notification of Acceptance: 15 April 2015 Early Registration deadline: 30 April 2015 Late Registration deadline (supplement 100EUR): 31 May 2015 Local Arrangement Information: 5 June 2015 Summer School: 21-26 June 2015 ============================================================================ ========== CfP: ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition ======= (repost) ===== ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition ------------------------------------- http://rrc.cvc.uab.es SUBMISSION OF RESULTS DUE: 2 April "Robust Reading" refers to the research area dealing with the interpretation of written communication in unconstrained settings. Robust Reading is at the meeting point between camera based document analysis and scene interpretation. The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition is organized around challenges selected to cover a wide range of real-world situations, which are in turn set up around different research tasks. The ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading competition will build upon the success of the previous editions and will introduce two key changes. First, a new "end-to-end" task is introduced aiming at simultaneous word localisation and recognition in images and videos. Second, a Challenge on incidental text is introduced based on a new large dataset (in the thousands of images), the focus of this challenge is on text that appears in the scene without the user having taken any specific prior action to cause its appearance or improve its positioning / quality in the image. Participation is welcome in any Task and Challenge in an open mode (submission of results over a provided test set). Organizers: Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Centre, Barcelona, Spain) Seiichi Uchida (Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan) Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan) Faisal Shafait (University of Western Australia) Vijay Chadrasekhar (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) Jiri Matas (Czech Technical University, Czech Republic) Lukas Neumann (Czech Technical University, Czech Republic) Lu Shijan (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) Lluis Gomez (Computer Vision Centre, Barcelona, Spain) Suman Ghosh (Computer Vision Centre, Barcelona, Spain) Anguelos Nicolaou (Computer Vision Centre, Barcelona, Spain) Ernest Valveny (Computer Vision Centre, Barcelona, Spain) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: AFHA 2015 ====================================== 4th Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA 2015) The 4th International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA 2015) will be organized in Gammarth, Tunisia, on August 21st-22nd, 2015 in conjunction with the ICDAR 2015. http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/afha2015 Building on the success of the previous three AFHA workshops in 2011 (Beijing, China), in 2013 (Washington DC, USA), and in 2014 (Hawaii, USA), the AFHA 2015 will continue the approach of bringing together researchers in the fields of automated handwriting/signature analysis and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. The AFHA 2015 will be organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorials, thereby drawing the attention of the PR community to the most relevant and generally neglected areas of forensic handwriting analysis and the concerned cutting edge research topics. On the first day, 21st August, various tutorials will be delivered by renowned handwriting experts and PR researchers working in the area of handwriting analysis. Note that there have been tutorials in 2011, 2013, and 2014, but every time, we cover new aspects and due to interactive discussions the tutorials will be interesting for regular attendees as well. On the second day, 22nd August, we invite researchers (from both PR and forensic science communities) to present novel results of their research related to the following topics. Topics of Interest - 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 Every registration is for the combined workshop/tutorial. Workshop Format AFHA is a 100% participation, two-day, single-track workshop/tutorial featuring keynote talks, tutorials, oral/poster presentations, and panel discussions. Publication Electronic copies of the workshop proceedings containing all accepted papers will be distributed at the workshop. After the workshop, all the authors will be invited to submit revised versions of their accepted papers for publication in the Journal of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, USA. Submission Information AFHA 2015 invites the submission of original, previously unpublished work and welcomes, with some restrictions, submissions which are closely related to work submitted to ICDAR 2015. This workshop employs single-blind review, in which referees remain anonymous for the authors throughout the process. Papers should not exceed 6 pages in IEEE format (double column). Link to full details of the formatting instructions, templates for LaTeX and MS-Word users are available at the AFHA 2015 homepage. Important Dates Paper submission due: May 30, 2015 Author Notification: June 25, 2015 Camera-ready paper due: July 15, 2015 ============================================================================ ========== CBDAR 2015: Call for Papers ====================== (repost) ===== 6th Int. Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition ------------------------------------------------------------------- The 6th International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2015) will be held in Gammarth, Tunisia, on August 22nd 2015 in conjunction with ICDAR 2015. http://www.cvc.uab.es/CBDAR2015 The pervasiveness and widespread availability of camera phones, hand-held digital still/video cameras and more recently wearable cameras have led the community to recognize camera captured images as a promising and growing field of research for document analysis and recognition. Document digitization techniques are gradually getting closer to camera based solutions, offering certain advantages (e.g. for scanning large scale or fragile documents), and presenting interesting new challenges and open problems which cannot be directly resolved by traditional techniques. Building on the success of the previous five CBDAR workshops in 2005 (Seoul, Korea), 2007 (Curitiba, Brazil), 2009 (Barcelona, Spain), 2011 (Beijing, China), and Washington DC (USA), CBDAR 2015 will be held in Gammarth, Tunisia in conjunction with ICDAR 2015. The aim of the workshop is to provide a natural link between document image analysis and the wider computer vision community by attracting cutting edge research on the topic. Topics of Interest: - camera based acquisition of written information - 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 - 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 - human-document interaction Workshop Chairs: Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Centre - Spain) Dr Faisal Shafait (University of Western Australia -Australia) Program Committee: -- tentative -- Michael Blumenstein (Griffith University, Austraria) Saqib Bukhari (DFKI, Germany) Basilis Gatos (NCSR Demokritos, Greece) Lluis Gomez (Computer Vision Centre, Spain) Muhammad Shehzad Hanif (King AbdulAziz University, Saudi Arabia) Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture Univ., Japan) Gaofeng Meng (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) Majid Mirmehdi (Bristol University, UK) Lukas Neumann (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic) Umapada Pal (ISI, India) Lu Shijian (Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore) Jun Sun (Fujitsu R&D Center, China) Seiichi Uchida (Kyushu Univ., Japan) Szilard Vajda (National Institutes of Health, USA) Workshop Format: CBDAR is a 100% participation, one-day, single-track workshop featuring keynote talks, oral/poster presentations, a demo session, and a panel discussion. Publications: Electronic copies of the workshop proceedings containing all contributed papers will be distributed at the workshop. After the workshop, revised versions of selected papers will be published in Springer LNCS series as post-proceedings. Submission Information: CBDAR 2015 invites the submission of original, previously unpublished work and welcomes, with some restrictions, submissions which are closely related to work submitted to ICDAR 2015. This workshop employs single-blind review, in which referees remain anonymous for the authors throughout the process. Papers should not exceed 6 printed pages in IEEE CS format. Full details of the formatting instructions, a sample document and templates for LaTeX and MS-Word users will be available at the CBDAR 2015 homepage soon. Important Dates: Paper submission due: May 15, 2015 Author Notification: June 25, 2015 Camera-ready paper due: July 8, 2015 ============================================================================ ========== Call for Parpers: Special Issue on Pattern Recognition ========== Special Issue on Pattern Recognition at IEEE Intelligent Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------- Submission Deadline: 25 May 2015 Publication: November/December 2015 Pattern Recognition (PR) is one of the key abilities in human and machine intelligence, and an important branch of the more broad area of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pattern recognition endows machines the ability of environmental perception, while cognition (including reasoning, knowledge engineering, and language understanding), is addressed by other branches of AI. PR and AI are often interwoven in intelligent systems (for example, the perceptron process exploits knowledge to solve ambiguities in recognition). The scope of Pattern Recognition includes pattern classification (statistical and structural PR, neural networks, kernel methods, ensemble methods, etc.), clustering, feature extraction and selection, data pre-processing (such as image processing and segmentation), visual object recognition, video analysis, applications in document analysis, biometrics, medical imaging, remote sensing image analysis, multimedia, video surveillance, intelligent transportation, and so on. Methods and applications have both seen tremendous advances in recent years. For example, deep learning methods have boosted performance in many fields such as handwriting recognition, facial recognition, speech recognition, traffic sign recognition, and so on. This special issue aims to report on and discuss the state of the art in pattern recognition theory and applications - particularly, new ideas, methods, and innovative applications. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: . Cognitive mechanism and mathematical foundation of PR . Pattern classification . Feature extraction and selection . Machine learning for pattern recognition . Object detection and recognition . Image and Video analysis . Applications in document analysis, biometrics, data mining, intelligent transportation, etc. Guest Editors . Cheng-Lin Liu, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China . Brian Lovell, University of Queensland, Australia . Dacheng Tao, University of Technology Sydney, Australia . Massimo Tistarelli, University of Sassari, Italy Submission Guidelines Submissions should be 3,000 to 5,400 words (counting a standard figure or table as 200 words) and should follow IEEE Intelligent Systems style and presentation guidelines ( www.computer.org/intelligent/author). The manuscripts cannot have been published or be currently submitted for publication elsewhere. We strongly encourage submissions that include audio, video, and community content, which will be featured on the IEEE Computer Society Website along with the accepted papers. ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================