============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter October 2012 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICDAR 2013, Washington, USA - Workshop, Tutorial, and Competition Proposals November 1, 2012 - Regular Paper Submission February 1, 2013 * New and Recently Published Datasets * Report: - 13th Int. Conf. on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2012) * Announcements - Street View Text Dataset Available * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Participation - Persian Heritage Image Binarization Competition (PHIBC 2012) * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the October edition of our TC-11 newsletter. This edition brings to you a new regular section that we want to introduce to the newsletter, namely the "New and Recently Published Datasets" section. It is meant to give a tabular overview in the style of the "Dates 'n' Deadlines" section on datasets that are newly available from (or via) the TC-11 website or have been made available recently. We hope that this section will help to increase the general awareness of publicly available datasets and to promote their use for benchmarking in future research efforts and related publications. In the detailed report on the recent ICFHR 2012 held in the Apulia region in Italy you will also read about the recipients of the awards presented. In addition you will find below the announcement of the Street View Text Dataset, a Call for Dataset Submissions by our Dataset Curator, and a Call for Participation in the Persian Heritage Image Binarization Competition. Finally, let me remind you that the submission deadline for Workshop, Tutorial, and Competition Proposals for ICDAR 2013 is on November 1st. Best regards, Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICDAR 2013, Washington, USA August 25-28, 2013 February 1, 2013 (http://www.icdar2013.org/) - Workshop proposals: November 1, 2012 - Tutorial proposals: November 1, 2012 - Competition proposals: November 1, 2012 * ACPR 2013, Okinawa, Japan November 5-8, 2013 June 10, 2013 (http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/ACPR2013/) ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== Name/Source of Dataset: Main Purpose: Published: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Street View Text Dataset Text detection/ NEW! Word spotting http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_Street_View_Text_Dataset * ICFHR 2010 and 2012 Signature Signature Verification 6/2012 Verification Datasets (4NSigComp2010 and 4NSigComp2012) For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ========== Report on ICFHR 2012 ============================================ Report on the 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2012) Sebastiano IMPEDOVO The 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR 2012, took place from September 18th to September 20th, 2012, at the Porto Giardino "Alpitour - Resort", Monopoli (Bari), in the sunny region of Apulia, in the South of Italy. ICFHR 2012 was organized by the University of Bari "Aldo Moro" and the "Rete Puglia" Centre and sponsored by the Technical Committee (TC11) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The scope of ICFHR 2012 covered all areas of online and offline handwriting preprocessing, segmentation, recognition, writer identification and verification for forensic and security issues. Motor models for writing and drawing, human reading models and psychological aspects, document and image retrieval techniques, multimedia systems, WWW applications, PDA applications etc. were also considered. The conference received the adhesion of the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, the patronage of the Prime Minister Prof. Mario Monti, the Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, Dr. Filippo Patroni Griffi, the Minister for Economic Development, Dr. Corrado Passera, as well as of local institutions like the Regional Governor Dr. Nichi Vendola, the President of the Province of Bari, Dr. Francesco Schittulli, and others Local Administrations. Many research and academic associations also sponsored the conference, as well as several national and multinational companies, such as Google and Hitachi. For ICFHR 2012, a two-track program was defined, which included 48 oral presentations and 83 poster presentations. The ICFHR 2012 proceedings were published by the IEEE Computer Society. More than 150 participants from 35 different countries of the five continents attended the conference, making it a great success. Additionally, two excellent IAPR invited talks delighted the ICFHR 2012 participants. The invited talk "Strokes Against Stroke - Stroke For Strides" was given by Prof. Rejean Plamondon (E'cole Polytechnique de Montre'al, Canada). The invited talk "Evaluating the Probability of Identification in the Forensic Sciences" was given by Prof. Sargur N. Srihari (University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA). For the first time in the IAPR history, a gold medal was assigned at ICFHR 2012 to one of the best researchers in the world in Pattern Recognition. The gold medal was given to Prof. Ching Yee Suen of the Concordia University for the promotion of Pattern Recognition research at Bari University "Aldo Moro". Prof. Ching Yee Suen received the gold medal directly from the Chancellor of the University of Bari. The videos and photos of the Opening Ceremony are visible on the website: http://www.icfhr2012.uniba.it. ICFHR 2012 was not only a high quality scientific meeting, as it was also enriched by surprises and musical events. The evening before the beginning of ICFHR 2012, the Provincial Orchestra of Bari welcomed ICFHR 2012 attendees with the amazing Symphony No. 38 ("Prague") in D Major, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by the conductor Flavio Castignano`. The Opening Ceremony of the conference, on the morning of Sept. 18th, started with a concert by the Gioacchino Ligonzo Orchestra under the direction of the conductor Angelo Schirinzi. This exhilarating concert involved and excited the whole audience with a wide range of well-known Italian music and soundtracks from famous movies. The final rendering of the Italian anthem was performed while the participants were in standing ovation. Another pleasant surprise was the extra tour to Alberobello by night, on the evening of Sept. 18th , after an exceptionally tasty dinner of typical food from the Apulia region. All participants were enchanted by the visit to Alberobello with its picturesque "trulli", small dry-stone houses built without mortar and with a typical conical-shaped roof. The participants enjoyed walking through the narrow streets of Alberobello, taking photos and buying souvenirs. Castellana Caves was the destination of the second tour, that took place on Sept. 19th. The magnificent grandeur of the caves fascinated the visitors, who were attracted by the beautiful natural sculptures, stalactites and stalagmites, created by nature over millions of years. After the visit to the caves, the Gala Dinner was offered in the wonderful natural scenario of Polignano a Mare. The participants were welcomed to the delightful banquet with speeches made by the General Chair of the conference, Prof. Sebastiano Impedovo, and the Honorary Chair, Prof. Ching Yee Suen, while they enjoyed not only the outstanding food, but also the wonderful panorama from the terraces over the sea. During the Gala Dinner, the participants were notified that, after the 14th ICFHR, which will be held in Crete, Greece, the proposal of China had been selected for the 15th ICFHR. Therefore, the 15th ICFHR will be held in Shenzen, China. During the last day of the conference, the panel session chaired by Prof. Lambert Schomaker was a stimulating forum to focus on new trends in the field of Handwriting Processing and Recognition. Then Prof. Volker Ma"rgner chaired the competition session. For each one of the four competitions, the organizers were invited to present the specific competition organization, the results and the winners. Regarding the first competition "ICFHR 2012 - Competition on Recognition of On-line Mathematical Expressions (CROHME 2012)", organized by H. Mouche`re, C. Viard-Gaudin, U. Garain, D. H. Kim and J. H. Kim, the winner was the Vision Objects Company. For the competition "ICFHR 2012 - Competition on Handwritten Document Image Binarization (H-DIBCO 2012)", organized by Ioannis Pratikakis, Basilis Gatos and Konstantinos Ntirogiannis, the winner was Nicholas Howe of the Smith College, Department of Computer Science, Northampton (MA), USA. For the competition "ICFHR2012 - Competition on Automatic Forensic Signature Verification (4NsigComp 2012)", organized by Marcus Liwicki, Muhammad Imran Malik, Linda Alewijnsey, Elisa van den Heuvely and Bryan Found, the winners were V. Nguyen and M. Blumenstein of the School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS), Griffith University, Australia. For the competition "ICFHR 2012 - Competition on Writer Identification - Challenge 1: Latin/Greek Documents", organized by G. Louloudis, B.Gatos and N. Stamatopoulos, the winners were Chawki Djeddi of the LAMIS Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Department, University of Tebessa, Tebessa, Algeria, Labiba Souici - Meslati of the LRI Laboratory, Computer Science Department, Badji Mokhtar, University of Annaba, Annaba, Algeria and Abdellatif Ennaji, LITIS Laboratory, Rouen University, Saint Etienne du Rouvray, Rouen, France. Finally, for the competition "ICFHR2012 - Competition on Writer Identification - Challenge 2: Arabic Scripts", organized by Abdel?aali HassaN?ne and Somaya Al Maadeed, the winners were Wei Zhang of the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and also Andrew Newell and Lewis Griffin of the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Finally, Prof. Sebastiano Impedovo chaired the Award Ceremony. He first introduced Prof. Louisa Lam and Prof. Umapada Pal, who selected the GIRPR Best Student Paper Award. The winner was Abedelkadir Asi for the paper "Layout Analysis for Arabic Historical Document Images Using Machine Learning" (authors: Syed Saqib Bukhari, Thomas Breuel, Abedelkadir Asi and Jihad El-Sana). Successively, Prof. Angelo Marcelli and Prof. Rejean Plamondon declared the IGS Best Student Paper Award, that was given to Jaques Swanepoel for the paper "Writer-specific Dissimilarity Normalisation for Improved Writer-independent Off-line Signature Verification" (authors: Jaques Swanepoel and Johannes Coetzer) and to George Eskander for the paper "Adaption of Writer-Independent Systems for Offline Signature Verification" (authors: George Eskander, Robert Sabourin and Eric Granger). Prof. Masaki Nakagawa and Prof. Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri assigned the IAPR Best Paper Award to the paper "Separability versus Prototypicality in Handwritten Word Retrieval " (authors: Jean-Paul Van Oosten and Lambert Schomaker) and the IAPR Best Poster Award to the paper "KHATT: Arabic Offline Handwritten Text Database" (authors: Sabri A. Mahmoud, Irfan Ahmad, Mohammad Alshayeb, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Mohammad Tanvir Parvez, Gernot A. Fink, Volker Ma"rgner and Haikal El Abed). Finally, Prof. Giuseppe Pirlo presented the Google Award for the Best PhD student paper according to the selection performed by Dr. Thomas Deselaers and Dr. Daniel Keysers from Google. The winner was Marianela Parodi for the paper "Online Signature Verification Based on Legendre Series Representation. Robustness Assessment of Different Feature Combinations" (authors: Marinela Parodi, Juan Carlos Gomez, Marcus Liwicki). At the end of the Award Ceremony, Prof. Sebastiano Impedovo closed the ICFHR 2012, thanking all supporting institutions, sponsors, organizers and, in particular, all the participants who made the great success of the 13th ICFHR possible. On the ICFHR 2012 website (http://www.icfhr2012.uniba.it) photos and videos of the conference are available to renew the emotions of the wonderful experience of attending the ICFHR 2012 in the Apulia region. ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: Street View Text Dataset Available ================ We are pleased to announce that "Street View Text Dataset" is now available through the TC11 Web site. The dataset is based on Google Street images and is particularly suitable to word spotting, as the ground truth comprises the location of local businesses' names (as defined for each image from Google's "search nearby" feature). http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_Street_View_Text_Dataset Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Dataset Curator dimos@cvc.uab.es ============================================================================ ========== Call for Dataset Submissions ==================================== We would like to remind you that the TC10 and TC11 welcome contributions of new datasets or other resources related to the community. We would like to particularly encourage authors of articles that introduce new datasets, software or other material to submit such material to TC11 for hosting. Please check the TC11 site on information about how to submit datasets for archiving ( http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets) also feel free to contact Dimosthenis Karatzas, the TC11 dataset curator, for any doubts you might have on the process. Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Dataset Curator dimos@cvc.uab.es ============================================================================ ========== Call for Participation ========================================== Persian Heritage Image Binarization Competition (PHIBC 2012) in conjunction with the 1st Iranian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRIA 2013) Dear colleagues/ distinguished researcher/ Professors We invite research groups to submit their algorithms in Persian heritage image binarization competition which is organized as a part of First Iranian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis 2013. Please note that participation in competition is independent of participation in the main conference. For more information about training set and procedure of competition, please visit the competition website at: http://www.phibc2012.ir with kind regards, Hossein Ziaei Nafchi. for the PHIBC organizers. ============================================================================ ========== Call for Contributions ========================================== This newsletter needs your support in order to provide useful information to the TC11 community. Therefore, please contribute relevant news by sending a short notice to the newsletter editor Gernot A. Fink . Such news could be the obvious announcements of conferences and workshops, job opportunities, reports on past conferences, book reviews, or anything that might be of interest to a wider audience involved in the construction of reading systems. ============================================================================ ========== Subscription Information ======================================== This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To manage your subscription, please visit the mailing list homepage at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11 The homepage for IAPR TC11 is http://www.iapr-tc11.org ============================================================================