# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## February, 2024 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [February 2024 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2024_02) **TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)    **X (Twitter):** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) ### TABLE OF CONTENTS - Message from the Editor - Dates and Deadlines - Deadlines - Upcoming Conferences and Events - Open Call for Organizing DAR Events *(repost)* - PhD Position in Machine Learning with a Focus on Vision-Language Models at Uppsala University - ICDAR 2024 Competition: Occluded RoadText Detection and Recognition - ICDAR 2024 Competition: Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking - ICPR 2024 Calls *(repost)* - SSDA 2025: Call for Proposals *(repost)* - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository - Recently published datasets - Where to share datasets Message from the Editor ======================= Dear TC11 members, We are in the midst of many active calls for papers, tutorials, competitions and workshops of two main DAR-conferences: ICDAR 2024 and ICPR 2024. We have been posting those calls in the previous newsletter issues. This issue highlights the calls which are still open along with calls for participation in ICDAR competitions (two of those competitions can be found in this issue). We also re-post here the open call for organizing our major DAR events that will be held in the coming years. Find also an interesting offer for a PhD position in machine learning with a focus on vision-language models at Uppsala University, Sweden. Good luck to all, and specially to the ones working hard to catch the submission deadlines. **Nibal Nayef, TC11 Communication 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 X (Twitter) (iapr\_tc11):** Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- **2024** - **March 1** Competition proposal submission for ICPR 2024 - **March 20** Paper submission for ICPR 2024 - **March 31** Workshop proposal submission for ICPR 2024 - **April 5** Proposal submission for hosting SSDA 2025 - **June 15** Tutorial submission for ICPR 2024 Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2024** - [ICPRAI 2024](https://brain.korea.ac.kr/icprai2024/). Jeju Island, South Korea (June 18-21, 2024) - [ICDAR 2024](https://icdar2024.net/). Athens, Greece (August 30 - September 4, 2024) - [ICPR 2024](https://icpr2024.org/). Kolkata, India (December 01-05, 2024) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events *(repost)* ============================================== The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference. In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events: - **ICDAR**: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in **2027**) - **DAS**: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in **2024**) - **GREC**: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in **2025**) - **SSDA**: Summer School on Document Analysis (biannually in odd years; next possibility in **2025**) You may find the details of each specific call in the previous or future issues of this newsletter or in the respective websites of each event. Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to and , in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal. **Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10)** **Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)** PhD Position in Machine Learning with a Focus on Vision-Language Models at Uppsala University ============================================================================================= We are currently looking for a PhD student to join the research group of the [Beijer Laboratory](https://www.ektavats.se/) at Uppsala University, Sweden. - Topic: PhD student in Machine Learning with a focus on Vision-Language Models - Location: Department of IT, Uppsala University - Job ad link: https://www.jobb.uu.se/details/?positionId=702336&languageId=1 - Last date to apply: March 28, 2024 **Project description** Vision-language models integrate computer vision and natural language processing techniques to process and generate information that combines both visual and textual modalities, enabling a more profound understanding of the content within images and videos. While vision-language models exhibit promising potential, they are currently in early stages of development. Effective integration of both modalities (vision and language), and aligning visual and text embeddings into a cohesive embedding space, continues to pose significant challenges. In this project, the successful candidate will conduct basic research and methods development towards designing efficient vision-language models, exploring their applications in computer vision and analyzing the consequential societal impact. Through our research, we aim to contribute significantly towards learning effective representations combining text, image and video data, potentially benefiting fields including surveillance and healthcare. Please feel free to gather more details from the job advertisement link above, if needed. The position is a part of the [Beijer Laboratory](https://www.ektavats.se/) for Artificial Intelligence Research, funded by Kjell and Märta Beijer Foundation. Work is in collaboration with Assistant Professor [Ekta Vats](https://www.beijerstiftelsen.se/en/component/zoo/researchers/ekta-vats-en?Itemid=234). ICDAR 2024 Competition: Occluded RoadText Detection and Recognition =================================================================== Call for Participation for ICDAR 2024 Occluded RoadText Competition The Occluded RoadText challenge is designed to evaluate and advance existing methodologies in scene text detection and recognition, specifically under conditions of partial occlusion. The challenge introduces a new dataset featuring real-world traffic scenes with natural objects obscuring parts of the text. Participants will need to develop methods that can decipher partially visible text and leverage the context of the entire image, including other visible texts, objects and supplementary images. The challenge contains three different tasks - 1. Text Localization, 2. Single Image End-to-End Recognition, and 3. Multi Image End-to-End Recognition **Competition Website** https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=29 **Important Dates** \* 15th January 2024: Competition Announced \* 19th February 2024: Validation data released \* 5th March 2024: Test data release \* 10th March 2024: Submission site opens \* 31st March 2024: Deadline for competition submissions All deadlines are in the AoE time zone. **Organizers** \* George Tom, Minesh Mathew, Ajoy Mondal, C. V. Jawahar - CVIT, IIIT Hyderabad \* Jerod Weinman - Grinnell College, USA \* Dimosthenis Karatzas - Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain ICDAR 2024 Competition: Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking ==================================================================== The ICDAR 2024 Competition on Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking is now live! If you are interested in text detection and recognition, we would like to invite you to register and participate: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=28 This competition aims to address the unique challenges of detecting and recognizing textual information (e.g., place names) and linking words to form location phrases from scanned historical map images. **Important Dates** - 1 February 2024: Training and validation data released - 1 March 2024: Competition test data released - 31 March 2024: Final results submission deadline **Task Overview** The competition encompasses four tasks: 1. word detection 2. phrase detection 3. word detection and recognition 4. phrase detection and recognition. Detailed descriptions of each task can be found on the [official web page](https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=28&com=tasks). Training and validation sets are already available, as well as evaluation tools. Follow us on X (Twitter) (@ICDAR24_MapText) to get the latest updates! This competition is organized by experienced competition organizers with the following affiliations: University of Minnesota (USA), Grinnell College (USA), National Geographic Agency of France, EHESS (France), EPITA (France). Looking forward to benchmarking your innovative solutions! --- ICDAR 2024 MapText Organizers: Contact: icdar24-maptext-contact (at) googlegroups.com Follow us: @ICDAR24_MapText ICPR 2024 Calls *(repost)* ========================== This is an ICPR-2024 call for Papers / Workshops / Tutorials / Competitions: Greetings from the ICPR-2024 organizing committee! The International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) is the flagship conference of the International Association of Pattern Recognition and the premier conference in Pattern Recognition, covering Computer Vision, Machine learning, Image, Speech, Sensor pattern processing etc. ICPR-2024 is the 27th event of the series which will be held at Kolkata, India during December 1-5, 2024. ICPR-2024 Organizing committee invites prospective researchers to submit papers, workshop proposals, tutorial proposals, competition proposals, etc. Information about the calls for Papers/Workshops/Tutorials/Competitions are available at the links in the left column of the ICPR-2024 website: https://icpr2024.org/ The deadlines for the different calls are as follows: - Paper submission deadline: March 20, 2024 - Competition Proposal submission deadline: March 1, 2024 - Workshop proposal submission deadline: March 31, 2024 - Tutorial proposal submission deadline: June 15, 2024 See the details of each call in the previous newsletter or on the ICPR 2024 website. Thank you very much and we are looking forward to your participation in ICPR-2024. Organization Committee: Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA SSDA 2025: Call for Proposals *(repost)* ======================================== Call for proposals for hosting the next summer school on document analysis Important Dates April 5, 2024 Proposal Submission Deadline Submit Proposals via email to: Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative), foteini.liwicki\@ltu.se , Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative), momina.moetesum\@seecs.edu.pk Part of the mission of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) TC11 and TC10 is to promote high quality educational activities related to Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. Responding to this need, TC10 and TC11 have established a series of summer schools. After the successful organization of summer schools in India, France, Pakistan, Sweden, and Switzerland, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the sixth "IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis" (SSDA) in 2025. The "IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis" is intended to become the primary educational activity of IAPR TC11 (Reading Systems) and TC10 (Graphics Recognition). The School is meant to be a training activity where participants are exposed to the latest trends and techniques of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The aim of the School is to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in selected topics of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The School should aim to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and PhD students in the field. Individuals and groups who are interested in Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting the 2025 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas and Africa are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarize themselves with the guidelines for organizing the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site or click here. The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures for organizing the School. Especially, this means that organizers will apply for IAPR support and that the event will use the series title "IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis" with an optional sub-title denoting a special focus of the respective event. Please consider submitting a proposal for this increasingly important event for the TC10/TC11 community. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact the TC11 and TC10 SSDA representatives: Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative) and Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative). Previous events: As a reference, the 2023 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Fribourg, Switzerland (URL: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/ ) Datasets ======== TC11 Datasets Repository ------------------------ ### Recently published datasets A Synthetic dataset of ID and Travel Documents (**SIDTD**) - Contributed: 2024-02-01 - Keywords: Dataset, Forgery detection, ID Documents verification - URL: https://tc11.cvc.uab.es/datasets/SIDTD\_1 ### Where to share datasets Did you know it? We have two official places for datasets: - Our historical platform for storage and listing: http://datasets.iapr-tc11.org - A Zenodo community (if you choose to submit your datasets there): https://zenodo.org/communities/iapr-tc11 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, [Nibal Nayef](mailto:n.nayef@gmail.com). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, job 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.