# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## May, 2021 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [May 2021 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2021_05) **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 - ICDAR 2021 - Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2021 Awards - ICDAR 2021: Workshops *(repost)* - GREC 2021 Workshop: Call for Papers - WIADAR 2021 Workshop: Call for Papers - Books - The Lognormality Principle and its Applications in e-Security, e-Learning and e-Health *(repost)* - Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval - State of the Art and Future Trends *(repost)* - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* Message from the Editor ======================= Dear TC11 members, As the [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org) conference is approaching, please note that several [workshops](https://icdar2021.org/program-2/workshops/) have extended their submission deadlines and are still open for paper submission. They are listed in the *Dates and Deadlines* section of this newsletter. Furthermore, the call for papers for the [GREC](https://grec2021.univ-lr.fr) and [WIADAR](https://sites.google.com/view/wiadar2021/home) workshops are provided below. Another deadline extension is related to two prestigious awards that will be presented at ICDAR, 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**. The deadline has been extended to **June 21st** for nominating individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition. A nominating letter and three supporting letters have to be sent to the TC10 and TC11 chairs, Jean-Christophe Burie and Faisal Shafait. More details are provided in the call below. The current COVID situation in Switzerland is favorable for holding ICDAR 2021 in hybrid mode with both on-site and online participants. It is recommended to [register for *on-site* participation](https://icdar2021.org/registration/) if you plan to attend the conference in person (early bird fees until **July 5th**). Should it become necessary to limit on-site participation to scientific and/or social events, the date of payment of the registration fee will be taken into account, following the **"first come, first serve"** principle. If travel is not possible due to COVID-related restrictions, a downgrade to online participation will be applied, refunding the difference in the registration fees. For staying up to date regading the conference, please check regularly the **official ICDAR 2021 conference website:** . Make sure to visit only the official website, it seems that unfortunately there may also be fake websites with similar URLs. To facilitate communication, the ICDAR organizers have also setup [Twitter](https://twitter.com/icdar2021) (@icdar2021) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/icdar2021) (https://www.linkedin.com/company/icdar2021). Follow the conference there for the latest news and updates and use **#icdar2021** for your posts about ICDAR. **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 --------- **2021** - **May 23** Paper submission [CBDAR](https://cbdar2021.univ-lr.fr) - **May 24** Paper submission [HIP](https://blog.sbb.berlin/hip2021/) - **May 28** Paper submission [GREC](https://grec2021.univ-lr.fr) - **May 28** Paper submission [WIADAR](https://sites.google.com/view/wiadar2021/home) - **May 31** Paper submission [ASAR](https://asar2021.wixsite.com/home) - **May 31** Paper submission [HDI](https://grce.labri.fr/HDI/index.html) - **June 7** Paper submission [ICDAR-OST](https://sites.google.com/view/icdar-ost-2021) - **June 19**: Paper submission [ACPR 2021](http://www.acpr2021.org) - **June 21**: Nominations for **IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award** and **IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award** Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2021** - [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org). Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10) - [ACPR 2021](http://www.acpr2021.org). Jeju Island, Korea (November 9-12) **2022 and Later** - [IGS 2021](https://www.igs2021.ulpgc.es). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (June, 2022) - [ICFHR 2022](http://icfhr2022.org/). Hyderabad, India (December, 2022) ICDAR 2021 ========== Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2021 Awards ------------------------------------------ **Important Dates** Nominations Due: June 21, 2021 The IAPR/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: - Research - Training of students - Research/Industry interaction - Service to the community 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 keynote speech at the ICDAR 2021 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference. Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2021 Awards in both categories. The nomination pack should include the following: 1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate. 2. 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. The submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed. Please send nominations packs electronically to the TC10 and TC11 chairs: **Jean-Christophe Burie ** and **Faisal Shafait **. ICDAR 2021: Workshops *(repost)* -------------------------------- During the pre-conference from September 5-7, 2021, several workshops related to document analysis and recognition will be held in conjunction with the ICDAR 2021 main conference: - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2021, 14th edition)](https://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2021, 9th edition)](https://cbdar2021.univ-lr.fr/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP 2021, 6th edition)](http://sbb.berlin/hip2021) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Arabic and Derived Script Analysis and Recognition (ASAR 2021, 4th edition)](https://asar2021.wixsite.com/home) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (IWCDF 2021, 3rd edition)](https://iwcdf2021.univ-lr.fr/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Future of Document Analysis and Recognition (FDAR 2021, 3rd edition)](https://sites.google.com/view/darstrategy/fdar-2021) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Human-Document Interaction (HDI 2021, 3rd edition)](https://grce.labri.fr/HDI/index.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning (WML 2021, 3rd edition)](https://www.isical.ac.in/~cvpr/ICDARWML21/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis (ICDAR-OST 2021, 3rd edition)](https://sites.google.com/view/icdar-ost-2021) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Industrial Applications of Document Analysis and Recognition (WIADAR 2021, 2nd edition)](https://easychair.org/cfp/WIADAR2021?target=content;action=published) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Computational Paleography (1st edition)](https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/iwcp2021.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Document Image and Language (WDIL 2021, 1st edition)](https://dil2021.github.io/index.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA 2021, 1st edition)](https://docvqa.org/static/workshop_2021.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Graph Representation Learning for Scanned Document Analysis (GLESDO 2021, 1st edition)](https://www.glesdo-icdar2021.ml/) For any question, please contact the **Workshop Chairs, Elisa Barney Smith and Umapada Pal**: GREC 2021 Workshop: Call for Papers ----------------------------------- 14th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC) September 5-6, 2021 Lausanne, Switzerland **Important dates:** May 28: Submission deadline, 11:59 PM Pacific Time Zone (hard deadline) June 25: Acceptance notification July 2: Camera-ready due GREC provides an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics Recognition is a subfield of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, comics, musical scores, sketches, maps, architectural plans, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc. The aim of this workshop is to maintain a very high level of interaction and creative discussions between participants, maintaining a 'workshop' spirit, and not being tempted by a 'mini-conference' model. GREC 2021 will continue the tradition of past workshops held at the Penn State University (USA), Nancy (France), Jaipur (India), Kingston (Canada), Barcelona (Spain),, Hong Kong (China), Curitiba (Brazil), La Rochelle (France), Seoul (Corea), Lehigh (USA), Nancy (France), Kyoto (Japan) and Sydney (Australia). The workshop will comprise several sessions dedicated to specific topics related to graphics in document analysis and graphic recognition. For each session, there will be an invited presentation describing the state of the art and stating the open questions for the sessionís topic, followed by a number of short presentations that will contribute by proposing solutions to some of the questions or presenting results of the speakerís work. Each session will be concluded by a panel discussion. We encourage the authors to submit papers on the topics below. **Topics** - Analysis and interpretation of graphical documents, such as: Engineering drawings, floorplans, mathematical expressions, comics, maps, music scores, patents, diagrams, charts, tables, etc. - Recognition of graphic elements, such as symbols, logos, stamps, dropcaps, drawings, etc. - Identification and localization of graphical mark-ups and annotations in written documents. - Raster-to-vector techniques. - Graphics-based information retrieval. - Historical graphics recognition and indexing. - Forensics (Writer identification/verification) in graphic documents. - Description of complete systems for interpretation of graphic documents. - Datasets and performance evaluation in graphics recognition. - Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for graphics multimedia documents. - 3-D models from multiple 2-D views (line drawings). - Digital ink processing. - Sketch recognition and understanding. - Camera-based graphics recognition. - Graphics recognition in born digital documents. - Analysis of graphics on new digital interfaces. - Graphics detection and recognition in real scenes. - Graphics analysis in medical images. **Guidelines for authors** For this edition, authors are invited to submit two types of paper: - Full papers describing complete works of research (12-15 pages). They will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 2 reviews considering the originality of work. - Short papers providing an opportunity to report on research in progress and to present novel positions on graphic recognition (up to 6 pages). Accepted papers (full and short papers) will be published in a Springer LNCS volume dedicated to all ICDAR workshops. The submited papers will respect the same policy and conditions of ICDAR 2021 conference papers. Papers should be formatted according to the instructions and style files provided by Springer. The LaTeX template for LNCS can be downloaded on the GREC Website (see Guidelines for authors at ). **General Chair: Jean-Christophe Burie** **Program Co-Chairs: Richard Zanibbi, Motoi Iwata, and Pau Riba** WIADAR 2021 Workshop: Call for Papers ------------------------------------- ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Industrial Applications of Document Analysis and Recognition (WIADAR 2021, 2nd edition) Lausanne Switzerland, 8-10 September 2021 **Important Dates:** May 28: Submission deadline (extended) June 25: Notificatons July 02: Camera-ready due (this is a hard deadline because of constraints of the publisher) There is a lot of innovative work being conducted in industry, or in public administrations, or in universities in partnership with industry or public administrations. Usually, the aim of applied research for industrial innovation is to breakthrough two main dimensions: performance (highest success with lowest critical error, resistance on specific constraints) and the user scope (application to a new domain, ability to adapt the application to another domain with a null or minimized effort). Hence, the nuance is that scientists target the methodology (how) when industrial fellows target the application (what). Most of applied research reuse, combine, tune and train existing methods with the advantage of accessing large corpuses of data. Industrial researchers either adapt or create methods with scientific innovations, but also with heuristics, workarounds, shortcuts, and whatever can pragmatically reach the target for an acceptable scope. Furthermore, we recognize that when industrial researchers create a real novel approach, the business strategy in the industrial competition prevents to disclose the information. Hence, that applied research could not be submitted at ICDAR. All these works are of interest to attendees of ICDAR, because experiments with large real-life dataset provides pragmatic feedbacks on technologies. They really demonstrate the state- of-the-art limitations, infer a ranking of technology performances and, both workarounds or optimizations may point out some new perspectives needed for research. In addition, it highlights end-user problematics and needs. i.e. It may infer academic perspectives. We do believe that, even if an application is not scientifically original or not clearly described, the result status and discussions around this method have a strong value for ICDAR attendees. This workshop is an effort to make information about innovative applications available to the general ICDAR attendee, and to allow those researchers and engineers the opportunity to attend ICDAR. It will hopefully also help build more interaction between industry/public administration and academia. **Topics of interest:** Industrial application domains include, but are not limited to: - Document analysis systems - Document Image Processing - Physical and logical layout analysis - Character and text recognition - Pen-based document analysis - Historical document analysis - Symbol and graphics recognition - Document forensics - Human document interaction - Scene text detection and recognition - Document retrieval - Verification and writer identification - Multimedia documents - Performance evaluation - Machine learning for document analysis - Cognitive issues of documents - Semantic information extraction from documents - Document summarization classification and translation - Document simulation and synthesis **Workshop format:** This workshop will be a poster-only workshop. Posters will be displayed during the main ICDAR conference alongside the ICDAR posters, but demarked to indicate they belong to this workshop. Papers are limited either to 6-8 pages (short paper, recommended) or 12-15 pages (long paper). These will be thoroughly peer reviewed. The paper length will be not an evaluation criterium. **Evaluation criteria:** - originality of the problem - pertinence of the evaluation protocol - pertinence of the performance compared to business competition - pertinence of the discussion - industrial impact: genericity and adaptability of the approach, i.e. adaption effort required when facing document variability or adaptation effort to setup a new user case. The weighting of the originality of the method will decrease if the work is applied to a new scenario with high performance, and if the method demonstrates good adaptability. **Vincent Poulain d'Andecy, Hiroshi Tanaka, and Elisa Barney Smith** **WIADAR 2021 Organizers** Books ===== The Lognormality Principle and its Applications in e-Security, e-Learning and e-Health *(repost)* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence (Volume 88) World Scientific, December 2020, 448 pages DOI: This compendium provides a detailed account of the lognormality principle characterizing the human motor behavior by summarizing a sound theoretical framework for modeling such a behavior, introducing the most recent algorithms for extracting the lognormal components of complex movements in 2, 2.5 and 3 dimensions. It also vividly reports the most advanced applications to handwriting analysis and recognition, signature and writer verification, gesture recognition and calligraphy generation, evaluation of motor skills, improvement/degradation with aging, handwriting learning, education and developmental deficits, prescreening of children with ADHD (Attention Development and Hyperactivity Disorder), monitoring of concussion recovery, diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and aging effects in speech and handwriting. The volume provides a unique and useful source of references on the lognormality principle, an update on the most recent advances and an outlook at the most promising future developments in e-Security, e-Learning and e-Health. Edited by: **Réjean Plamondon (Polytechnique Montréal, Canada)** **Angelo Marcelli (Università di Salerno, Italy)** **Miguel Ángel Ferrer (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain)** Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval - State of the Art and Future Trends *(repost)* -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence (Volume 89) World Scientific, November 2020, 268 pages DOI: In recent years, libraries and archives all around the world have increased their efforts to digitize historical manuscripts. To integrate the manuscripts into digital libraries, pattern recognition and machine learning methods are needed to extract and index the contents of the scanned images. The unique compendium describes the outcome of the HisDoc research project, a pioneering attempt to study the whole processing chain of layout analysis, handwriting recognition, and retrieval of historical manuscripts. This description is complemented with an overview of other related research projects, in order to convey the current state of the art in the field and outline future trends. This must-have volume is a relevant reference work for librarians, archivists and computer scientists. Edited by: **Andreas Fischer (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)** **Marcus Liwicki (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)** **Rolf Ingold (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)** Datasets ======== 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)** ( ) 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.