# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## June, 2020 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [June 2020 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2020_06) **TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)    **Twitter:** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) ### TABLE OF CONTENTS - Message from the Editor - Dates and Deadlines - Deadlines - Upcoming Conferences and Events - Conferences - ICFHR 2020 Goes Virtual - Datasets - Kannada OCR benchmarking dataset - TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* - Careers - Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) *(repost)* Message from the Editor ======================= This brief newsletter is mainly to announce that the 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition ([ICFHR 2020](http://www.icfhr2020.org)) will be a fully virtual conference. Early bird registration is open until July 31, 2020. Further, in the dataset section, a new Kannada OCR benchmarking dataset has been made freely available. **Andreas Fischer, TC11 Communications Officer** ( ) **Join us!** If you are not already a member of the TC11 community, please consider joining the [TC11 mailing list](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1). **Follow us on Twitter (iapr\_tc11):** Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- **2020** - **July 15**: Paper submission (second round) [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/) - **November 2**: Article submission (journal track) [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org) Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2020** - [DAS 2020](http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/). Virtual (July 27-29) - [ICFHR 2020](http://www.icfhr2020.org). Virtual (September 8-10) - [ICPRAI 2020](https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~icprai20). Zhongshan, China (October, TBA) **2021 and Later** - [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/). Milan, Italy (January 10-15, 2021) - [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org). Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10, 2021) - **ICFHR 2022**. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022) Conferences =========== ICFHR 2020 Goes Virtual ----------------------- The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the world and the way people interact. Unfortunately, this also affects the organization of scientific exchange during conferences. Therefore, the ICFHR 2020 Organizing Team has decided to make ICFHR 2020 a fully virtual event. Thus we can ensure the safety of all participants and the possibility of broad international participation. Additionally, we will be able to make reliable plans for this important conference of the Document Analysis community. The details of the presentation and interaction formats of the virtual ICFHR will be worked out in the coming weeks. Please look for the respective announcements on the [ICFHR 2020 website](http://www.icfhr2020.org) and in this newsletter. The [conference registration](http://www.icfhr2020.org/registration/) is open, with early bird registration until *July 31, 2020*. **Gernot A. Fink - ICFHR 2020 General Chair** ( ) Datasets ======== Kannada OCR benchmarking dataset -------------------------------- Link to the dataset: This Kannada OCR benchmarking dataset contains 250 images, carefully chosen to have various kinds of recognition challenges. Some of the pages have italics and bold characters. Some of them have Halegannada poems and text; others are letterpress-printed pages, where the vowel modifiers appear as separate symbols and do not touch the consonants they go with. Some pages have interspersed English words; still others have tables with a lot of numeric data. In addition, there are old pages containing either a lot of broken characters or many words with two or more characters merged into a single connected component. More information together with OCR results can be found in H.R. Shiva Kumar and A.G. Ramakrishnan, "Lipi Gnani: A Versatile OCR for Documents in Any Language Printed in Kannada Script", ACM Trans. TALLIP, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2020. This article is available open access until end of June 2020: TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* ----------------------------------- TC11 maintains a collection of datasets that can be found online in the [TC11 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 use the [online upload form](http://tc11.cvc.uab.es/upload/). For questions and support, please contact the TC11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below). **Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)** ( ) 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, [Andreas Fischer](mailto:andreas.fischer@hefr.ch). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC11 community. **Subscription:** This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To join the TC11 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 TC11 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 (TC11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.