# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## December, 2024 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [December 2024 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2024_12) **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)* - IGS 2025 - Call for Papers for the Conference of International Graphonomics Society *(repost)* - ICDAR 2025 - Call for Papers *(repost)* - DAR-Related Competitions - Inference Attacks Against Document VQA (Red Teaming Competition at SaTML 2025) - ICDAR 2025 Competition on Automatic Classification of Literary Epochs (CoLiE) - ICDAR 2025 Competition on Historical Map Text Detection, Recognition and Linking - Call for Hosting Proposals: ICDAR 2028 *(repost)* - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository - Where to share datasets Message from the Editor ======================= Dear TC11 members, As usual, the December issue is out earlier than the regular end-of-the-month release date; hoping you will read it before the holidays. In this issue, find our open call for organizing the major DAR events that will be held in the coming years, the call for papers for ICDAR 2025 and the call for IGS 2025 (International Conference Graphonomics Society) that contains topics in document analysis and recognition. There is also a number of calls for participation in competitions with new and interesting research problems in the DAR field. The call for bids for hosting ICDAR 2028 is reposted here as well. Finally, please have a look at our upcoming deadlines and events of 2025 ... and here is wishing you happy peaceful holidays and a happy new year! **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 --------- **2025** - **Jan 31** Proposal submission for hosting ICDAR 2028 - **Feb 7** ICDAR paper title & abstract submission - **Feb 16** IGS (International Graphonomics Society) paper submission - **Feb 21** ICDAR full paper submission Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2025** - [IGS 2025](https://www.igs2025.org/en). Polytechnique Montréal, Canada (June 17-20, 2025) - [ICDAR 2025](https://www.icdar2025.com/). Wuhan, Hubei, China (September 17-21, 2025) 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 **2028**) - **DAS**: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in **2026**) - **HIP**: International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in **2025**) - **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)** IGS 2025 - Call for Papers for the Conference of International Graphonomics Society *(repost)* ============================================================================================== We cordially invite you to submit an abstract for an oral or poster presentation at the 22nd Conference of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS 2025), held at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada, from June 17 to 20, 2025, under the theme Investigating ***Human Movements - Handwriting and Beyond***. This conference is the premier forum for presenting new advances and research results in graphonomics and in human movement at large from an interdisciplinary point of view. IGS 2025 will cover wide-ranging subjects and continue the tradition of bringing together academics, researchers, professionals and students to share knowledge in the field of graphonomics and human movement. **Paper Submission** Abstracts (4 pages) must be submitted according to the template provided before February 16, 2025, and will be reviewed by the Program Chairs and the Program Committee Members. Authors will be notified of the results of the review process by email in March 2025. Authors of accepted conference papers will be invited to submit ***full manuscripts*** for consideration by major international journals, each publishing a special issue based upon selected papers of IGS 2025: Pattern Recognition Letters, International Journals of Forensic Document Examination, Human Movement Science, and other potential journals. Also, different Student Prizes will be awarded at the conference. **Topics** - Motion capture: Movement analysis, Movement segmentation and gesture recognition - Multimodal fusion and registration - Neurosciences and motor control - Robotics and motion control, anthropomorphic robots - Motion-based human-machine interface and augmented/virtual reality - **Handwriting, signature and movement synthesis, generative AI** - **Document analysis and recognition** - Applications in healthcare - Applications in education - Applications in sports - Applications in arts - Applications in forensic and security - **Handwriting, signature and movement datasets** - Privacy preservation, data anonymization - Biomarkers in handwriting and human movements - Gold standards benchmarks **Important Dates** - February 16, 2025: Abstract submission deadline - March 17, 2025: Paper acceptance notice - April 15, 2025: Presenting author registration - April 15, 2025: Early bird registration deadline - May 5, 2025: Camera-ready deadline - September 15, 2025: Deadline for submission of selected papers for special issues (journals) For more information on paper submission or any other questions, please visit: https://www.igs2025.org/en/participate/abstract-submission https://www.igs2025.org/en/contact ICDAR 2025 - Call for Papers *(repost)* ======================================= ICDAR is the premier event for scientists and practitioners involved with document analysis and recognition, a field of growing importance in our current age of digital transition. The 18th edition of this flagship conference will be held in Wuhan, September 17-21, 2025. **Conference Paper Submissions:** The submission details for the standard conference paper track at ICDAR 2025 can be found at: https://www.icdar2025.com/submission/call-for-papers The Review of conference papers will be double blind. Authors should not include their names, affiliations, or acknowledgements in submitted manuscripts, and should ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their earlier work in the third person. Papers may be up to 15 pages long (including references) in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format. Detailed submission instructions for authors can be found on the conference website: (https://www.icdar2025.com/). **Important Dates** - Feb 7, 2025: Conference Title & Abstract submission deadline - Feb 21, 2025: Conference full paper upload and editing closed - Apr 11, 2025: Conference reviews due - Apr 18, 2025: Conference rebuttal due - Apr 25, 2025: Conference paper acceptance notation - May 16, 2025: Camera-Ready **Publication: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science** The conference proceedings will be published as part of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Accepted papers will be freely available through SpringerLink from the conference website for one year after publication, and will later be freely available through SpringerLink four years after publication. **Contact:** Xu-Cheng Yin Dimosthenis Karatzas Daniel Lopresti DAR-Related Competitions ======================== Inference Attacks Against Document VQA (Red Teaming Competition at SaTML 2025) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We are excited to invite you and your colleagues to participate in the Red Teaming Competition at [SaTML 2025](https://satml.org/), titled "***Inference Attacks Against Document VQA***", which focuses on privacy vulnerabilities in Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) models. This competition presents a unique opportunity to explore critical privacy concerns in AI, specifically through the development of membership inference and reconstruction attacks tailored to DocVQA models. More details, including competition rules and registration, can be found on the official website: https://benchmarks.elsa-ai.eu/?ch=2&com=introduction. **Important Dates:** - Submission Deadline: February 28, 2025 - Announcement of Winning Teams: March 10, 2025 - Competition Track: April 9-11, 2025 (during SaTML 2025) For any inquiries or further information, please do not hesitate to contact us at: ***info\_pfl\@cvc.uab.cat***. We look forward to your participation and the innovative solutions you will bring to this critical area of AI privacy research. The competition is organized by the European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (ELSA). **Organizers:** Andrey Barsky (Computer Vision Center) Antti Honkela (University of Finland) Aurélie Joseph (YOOZ) Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Center) Raouf Kerkouche (CISPA) Ernest Valveny (Computer Vision Center) Joonas Jälkö (University of Finland) Kangsoo Jung (INRIA) Khanh Nguyen (Computer Vision Center) Marlon Tobaben (University of Finland) Mario Fritz (CISPA) Mohamed Ali Souibgui (Computer Vision Center) Vincent Poulain d'Andecy (YOOZ) ICDAR 2025 Competition on Automatic Classification of Literary Epochs (CoLiE) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- We are pleased to announce the [ICDAR 2025 Competition on Automatic Classification of Literary Epochs (CoLiE)](https://colie.pro/), which aims to push the boundaries of temporal text analysis by challenging participants to develop state-of-the-art methods for dating literary texts. The competition focuses on leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) techniques to predict the time periods in which texts were written. **Overview** The CoLiE competition offers two main tasks to address temporal classification and the understanding of historical texts: [Task 1: Literary Epochs Classification](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/icdar-2025-ColiE_Task1) This task focuses on classifying texts based on literary epochs and their subdivisions: Sub-task 1.1: Classification of texts into six major literary epochs when the corresponding books were written: (1) Classicism (1660-1798), (2) Romanticism (1798-1837), (3) Victorian Literature (1837-1901), (4) Modernism (1900-1945), (5) Postmodernism (1945-2000), and (6) Contemporary (from 2000). Sub-task 1.2: Classification of texts into particular epoch subdivisions: early (first quarter of the epoch), middle (middle half), and late (final quarter). These periods differ in length between epochs (due to the different lengths of the corresponding epochs). Also, the epochs of Classicism, Romanticism, Victorian Literature, Modernism, and Postmodernism epochs were divided into three periods, while the Contemporary epoch is divided into only two periods. [Task 2: ChronoText Classification](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/icdar-2025-ColiE_Task2) This task addresses temporal granularity by focusing on: Sub-task 2.1: Identifying the century of origin for a given text. Sub-task 2.2: Pinpointing the specific decade within that century when the text was composed. **Participation** We invite researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts from IR and NLP communities to participate in this exciting competition. How to Participate: - Visit our website: https://colie.pro/ - Familiarize yourself with the tasks, competition rules, datasets, and evaluation metrics - Submit your results through the Kaggle competition platform **Important Dates** - December 17, 2024: The competition website is live and open to participants. Training and validation sets, together with their labels, are available - April 1, 2025: Test dataset available - April 8, 2025: Deadline for competition participants - May 1, 2025: Submission of competition reports - May 16, 2025: Camera-ready paper - June 30, 2025: Communicate winners to chairs - September 17-21, 2025: Presentation of results at the special session at the ICDAR conference **Contact** For any inquiries, please contact the competition organizers at: ***colie2025.competition\@gmail.com***. We look forward to your participation and innovative contributions to the field of temporal text analysis! **Organizers** Marina Litvak, SCE (marinal\@ac.sce.ac.il) Irina Rabaev, SCE (irinar\@ac.sce.ac.il) Ricardo Campos, University of Beira Interior, INESC TEC (ricardo.campos\@ubi.pt) Alípio Jorge, University of Porto, INESC TEC (amjorge\@fc.up.pt) Adam Jatowt, University of Innsbruck (adam.jatowt\@uibk.ac.at) Roza Bass, SCE (rozzaba\@ac.sce.ac.il) Hugo Sousa, University of Porto, INESC TEC (hugo.sousa\@fc.up.pt) ICDAR 2025 Competition on Historical Map Text Detection, Recognition and Linking -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Overview** The 2025 ICDAR competition focuses on detecting, recognizing, and linking text in historical map images. New features of this competition edition include expanded French Land Registers and Taiwanese map datasets, synthetic training data, and enhanced evaluation metrics. Registration and details: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=32. The training and validation sets are already available. Join our Google Group to receive updates: https://groups.google.com/g/icdar25-maptext-news Submission deadline: April 1, 2025. **Call for participants** After a successful 2024 edition, we are pleased to announce the 2025 edition of the ICDAR Competition on Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking. This edition still focuses on text detection and recognition in challenging historical map images, and introduces several new features: - expanded data for the French Land Registers dataset - addition of a new Taiwanese maps dataset from the GIS Center at Academia Sinica, featuring Chinese characters - release of large synthetic training data for each dataset - improved evaluation metrics and indicators for better feedback We would like to invite you to register and participate using the following links: - Official competition platform: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=32 - Receive updates by email: https://groups.google.com/g/icdar25-maptext-news **Important dates** - December 10, 2024: Website live, train/val sets available - March 1, 2025: Test set available, submissions are open - April 1, 2025: Final submission deadline, including short reports **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 for each task can be found on the official web page: https://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=32&com=tasks **Contact**: icdar25-maptext-contact (at) googlegroups.com This competition is organized by experienced competition organizers from the following organizations: University of Minnesota (USA), Grinnell College (USA), Univ Gustave Eiffel, ENSG, IGN, LASTIG (France), EHESS (France), EPITA (France), Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Looking forward to benchmarking your innovative solutions! --- ICDAR 2025 MapText Organizers Call for Hosting Proposals: ICDAR 2028 *(repost)* ================================================= Deadline: January 31, 2025 Submission Method: Email to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer and Jean-Christophe Burie The International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) is the flagship event of TC10/11. It has been established as a bi-annual conference in 1991 and is held annually since 2023. The aim of ICDAR is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition. The ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking proposals to host the 22nd International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in 2028 (ICDAR 2028). Any consortium interested in making a proposal to host an ICDAR should first familiarize themselves with the "Guidelines for Organizing and Bidding to Host ICDAR" document which is available on the TC10 and TC11 websites ( and , respectively). **Important Notice (coordination with ICPR 2028):** To facilitate participation at ICDAR 2028 and ICPR 2028, organizing teams are requested to make sure that there is no overlap between the two conferences, and a gap of at least one month if they are organized in the same geographical region. The location of ICPR 2028 will be known in December 2024. A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Please check on the website of TC11 for the latest version. *Note that the current guidelines still refer to a bi-annual event. An updated version is coming soon that will reflect the change to an annual conference.* The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures outlined in that document. The submitted proposal must define clearly the items specified in the guidelines (Section 5.2). It has been the tradition that the location of ICDAR conferences follows a rotating schedule among different continents. Hence, proposals from the Americas are strongly encouraged. However, high quality bids from other locations, for example, from countries where we have had no ICDAR before, will also be considered. Proposals will be examined by the ICDAR Advisory Board. Proposals should be emailed to the TC10/11 chairs Andreas Fischer and Jean-Christophe Burie by January 31, 2025. **ICDAR Advisory Board,** **Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11), Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10), Anna Esposito (Chair, IAPR C&M), Koichi Kise, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Srirangaraj Setlur** Datasets ======== TC11 Datasets Repository ------------------------ ### 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.