# IAPR TC-11 (READING SYSTEMS) NEWSLETTER
## March, 2018 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [March 2018 Newsletter]( **Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer** ( ) Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- - **Mar. 23/30, 2018 (EXTENDED):** ICFHR 2018 abstract/paper submissions ([Call for Papers](http://icfhr2018.org/call.html)) - Mar. 29, 2018: ACM DocEng 2018 short papers and application note submissions ([Call for Papers](https://doceng.org/doceng2018/cfp)) Upcoming Conferences -------------------- **2018** - [DAS 2018](https://das2018.caa.tuwien.ac.at). Vienna, Austria (24-27 April, 2018) - [ICPRAI 2018](http://icprai2018.com). Montreal, Canada (May 14-17, 2018) - [ICFHR 2018](https://icfhr2018.org). Niagara Falls, USA (August 5-8, 2018) - [ICPR 2018](http://www.icpr2018.org). Beijing, China (August 20-24, 2018) - [DocEng 2018](https://doceng.org/doceng2018). Halifax, Canada (August 28-31, 2018) **2019 and Later** - [ICDAR 2019](http://www.icdar2019.org), Sydney, Australia (September 22-25, 2019) - [ICFHR 2020](http://www.icfhr2020.org). Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020) Datasets ======== TC-11 maintains a colletion of datasets that can be found online in the [TC-11 Datasets Repository](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets). If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to share with the research community, please contact the TC-11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below). **Andreas Fischer (TC-11 Dataset Curator)** () ICFHR ===== ICFHR 2018: Call for Papers (**Deadline Extended**) --------------------------------------------------- **The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition** *August 5 - 8, 2018 - Niagara Falls, USA* Web page: [icfhr2018.org](http://icfhr2018.org) PDF Version: [ICFHR2018\_CFP.pdf](http://icfhr2018.org/pdf/ICFHR2018_CFP.pdf) **Important Dates (Deadline Extended!)** *March 23, 2018* Paper abstract submission (*extended*) *March 30, 2018* Full paper submission (*extended*) May 25, 2018 Author notifications June 22, 2018 Camera-ready papers due The **International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR)** is the flagship conference for handwriting recognition research and applications. The conference brings together experts in handwriting recognition from academia and industry to share their experiences and promote research and development in all aspects of handwriting recognition and handwriting applications. This year's **keynote speakers** will be Dr. Kevin Knight and Dr. Gregory R. Crane (biographies are available online: http://icfhr2018.org). **Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:** - Handwriting Recognition - Cursive Script Recognition - Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition - Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding - Language Models in Handwriting Recognition - Web-Based Applications - Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries - Information Extraction & Retrieval - Document Characterization - Form Processing - Word Spotting - Bank-Check Processing - Historical Document Processing - Forensic Studies and Security Issues - Writer Verification and Identification - Performance Enhancement and System Evaluation - Electronic Ink and Pen-Based Systems - Other Offline and Online Applications **Authors are invited to submit full-length papers of not more than six (6) pages.** Papers must describe original work, and paper reviews will be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the ICFHR 2018 web site ([icfhr2018.org](http://icfhr2018.org)). Questions about paper submission should be directed to the Program Chairs ( ). **Richard Zanibbi, Co-Chair, ICFHR 2018** ( ) ICFHR 2018 Competitions: Call for Participation (repost) -------------------------------------------------------- **Web:** **Twitter:** [@IAPR_TC11](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/IAPR-TC11:Reading\_Systems) @@ICFHR2018 @@ICFHR2018competitions **Important Dates** 1 June 2018: Full papers describing competitions due 29 June 2018: Accepted camera-ready papers due ICFHR 2018 is hosting seven competitions in the following areas: - Handwritten Document Image Binarization Contest - Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts - Multi-script Writer Identification - Vietnamese Online Handwritten Text Recognition using HANDS-VNOnDB - Competition on Automated Text Recognition on a READ Dataset - Document Image Analysis Tasks for Southeast Asian Palm Leaf Manuscripts - Thai Student Signature and Name Components Recognition and Verification Please visit the competitions [web page](http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html), and contact the organizers through the available links. If you have any questions, please contact the Competitions Chairs at . **Harold Mouchère and Nicholas Howe, ICFHR 2018 Competition Chairs** ( ) DAS 2018 ======== DAS 2018 Discussion Groups (repost) ----------------------------------- 13TH IAPR INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON DOCUMENT ANALYSIS SYSTEMS 24-27 April, Vienna, Austria According to a long-standing tradition at the DAS workshops, we will hold small-group discussions on topics of special interest to attendees. It is a nice opportunity to meet other researchers and discuss on relevant topics for the community. Everyone is welcome to participate in the discussions. Moreover, each group needs a moderator and a scribe. Their roles are: - The moderator encourages everyone to speak and helps to focus and clarify the discussion. - The scribe takes written notes of the discussion and summarizes the results in a plenary session. The moderator and the scribe will co-author a short summary report after the workshop is over, which will be posted to the workshop website and at the TC-11 website (). The names of the moderators and scribes will be also listed at the website. Please fill this form () choosing the topics of your interest, and feel free to propose some. We are looking forward to your participation! Please contact the Discussion Groups coordinators with your suggestions and ideas: **Alicia Fornés** () **Marcus Liwicki** () ICPR: Competitions ================== ICPR 2018: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification Competition (repost) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Web:** **Important Dates** Feb. 20: Competition starts Mar. 20: Release of evaluation data Apr. 21: Code submission deadline Apr. 22: Decryption key release Apr. 24: End of competition Apr. 27: Deadline for fact sheet submission Apr. 30: Paper submisssion deadline May 10: Release of verification results Aug. 21: Workshop and award ceremony at ICPR A Competition on Multimedia Information Processing for Personality and Social Networks Analysis is being held as a part of ICPR 2018 by members of IAPR TC-12. One task in particular may be of interest to the TC-11 community: **Task 2 - HWxPI: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification.** The corpus used in this task consists of handwritten Spanish essays from undergraduates Mexican students. For each essay two files are available: a manual transcript of the text and a scan image of the original sheet where the subject hand-wrote the essay. The texts of manual transcriptions have tags to mark some handwritten phenomena namely: - FO (well-written word (misspelling)), - D (description (drawing)), - IN (insertion of a letter into a word), - MD (modification of a word, that is a correction of a word), - DL (elimination of a word), - NS (when two words were written together; e.g. Iam instead of I am ) and, - SB (syllabification). Each essay is labelled with five values corresponding to 5 personality traits in the Big Five Model of Personality. The traits are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and Openness to experience. The range of the value for each trait is 1 to 7. For additional details, please contact Dr. Dimos Karatzas, who can direct you to the competition organizers. **Dimosthenis Karatzas, ICPR Contest Co-Chair** () ICPR 2018 Contest on Fraud Detection: Call for Participation (repost) --------------------------------------------------------------------- **Web Page:** **Important Dates** Feb.: Training dataset available Mar. 30: Registration deadline Apr. 5: Evaluation dataset is available Apr. 10: Result submission deadline Apr. 15: Submitted description of methods Aug. 20-24: Conference We are pleased to announce the Fraud Detection Contest in conjunction with ICPR 2018. In recent decades, the explosion of the volume of digital documents images and development of easy-to-use consumer tools to edit these images has led to a huge increase in the number of corrupted documents. The development of many tools and methods to detect modifications has also increased but their evaluation remains a challenge. Forensics research is a sensitive topic. Datasets are often private or unlabeled and most related works are evaluated based on undisclosed datasets. This restriction has two major consequences: results cannot be reproduced and no benchmarking can be done between approaches. This contest was conceived in order to address these drawbacks: - First, a public image and text dataset of French shopping receipts containing no private information was designed so that it can be disclosed and used with no constraints. - Second, the contest should finally presents a benchmark on major works developed over many years, both for image and text processing methods. The contest is open to all researchers and engineers working on detection of forgery within documents, images or texts, coming from different domains (forensics, document analysis, data mining...). **-- Tasks --** **Task 1:** The detection of modified documents. The provided dataset will contain both genuine and modified documents. The first task aims at discovering which ones are forged. **Task 2:** The spotting of this or these falsification(s) in the document (many falsifications can occur in one document), with methods applied to the image or text, or both. Additional Information and Registration may be found on the competition web page: **Jean-Marc Ogier, Competition Organizer** ( ) IJDAR ===== IJDAR Latest Issue (Vol. 20, Issue 4) ------------------------------------- **Table of Contents** Click on the links to go directly to the Springer Link page for each article. [A restoration method for distorted comics to improve comic contents identification.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0291-9) Authors:Sang-Hoon Lee, Doyoung Kim, Sagar Jadhav, Sanghoon Lee [Character segmentation and transcription system for historical Japanese books with a self-proliferating character image database.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0292-8) Authors: Chulapong Panichkriangkra, Liang Li, Takaaki Kaneko, Ryo Akama, Kozaburo Hachimura [Recognition of handwritten Lanna Dhamma characters using a set of optimally designed moment features.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0290-x) Authors: Papangkorn Inkeaw, Phasit Charoenkwan, Hui-Ling Huang, Sanparith Marukatat, Shinn-Ying Ho, Jeerayut Chaijaruwanich IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost) ---------------------------------------- IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below: - - [http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjrnlsub.php](http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjournal.php) **Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti and Simone Marinai, IJDAR Editors-in-Chief** ( , , ) Careers ======= Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) - (repost) ------------------------------------------------------------- [IAPR's Industrial Liaison Committee](http://www.iapr.org/committees/committees.php?id=5&subid=53) is pleased to announce the opening of its Company Internship Brokerage List. The web page lists internship opportunities for students at different levels of education and specialism. We expect many additional internship opportunities to be listed here as the community becomes more aware of the site. IAPR Company Internship Brokerage List: **Bob Fisher, Chair, IAPR Industrial Liason Committee** ( ) Contributions and Subscriptions ================================== **Call for Contributions:** To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, [Richard Zanibbi](mailto:rxzvcs@cs.rit.edu). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC-11 community. **Subscription:** This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To join the TC-11 mailing list, please click on [this link](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1). To manage your subscription, please visit the [mailing list homepage](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IAPR TC-11 HOMEPAGE: [http://www.iapr-tc11.org](http://www.iapr-tc11.org) The IAPR is the International Association for Pattern Recognition. IAPR's Technical Committee No. 11 (TC-11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.