IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2019 01

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January, 2019


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Table of Contents

  • Message from the Editor
  • Message from the TC Chair
  • Dates and Deadlines
    • Deadlines
    • Upcoming Conferences and Events
  • Datasets
  • Conferences
    • ICDAR 2019: Call for Papers *(repost)*
    • IGS 2019: Call for Papers
    • ICPRAI 2020: Preliminary Call for Papers, Exhibitions, and Sponsors *(repost)*
  • ICDAR: Awards and Proposals
    • Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2019 Awards
    • Call for Proposals to host ICDAR 2023
  • ICDAR 2019: Workshops
    • GREC 2019: First Announcement
  • ICDAR 2019: Competitions
    • List of ICDAR 2019 Competitions
    • Call for Participation: ICDAR 2019 CROHME + TFD Competition
  • Journals
    • Pattern Recognition Letters Special Issue on DLVTA: Deep Learning for Video Text Analysis
    • Pattern Recognition Special Issue on Scene Text Reading and its Applications (STRA) (*repost*)
    • IJDAR: Latest Issue (Vol. 21, Issue 4) *(repost)*
    • MDPI Journal of Imaging: Special Issue on Document Image Processing *(repost)*
    • IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members *(repost)*
  • Books
    • New Book on Graphics Recognition (by KC Santosh) (*repost*)
  • Careers
    • Faculty Positions at the University of Michigan (USA) *(repost)*
    • Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) (*repost*)


Message from the Editor


Hi everyone and Happy New Year! I am Andreas Fischer, the former TC11 Dataset Curator and the new TC11 Communications Officer.

First of all, I would like to warmly thank Richard Zanibbi for his formidable editorial work over the past two years. He has not only carefully collected, selected, and prepared relevant news for us, he has also modernized the newsletter itself. Did you know that there is an online version of the newsletter with convenient accordion menus for navigation? Please have a look at http://www.iapr-tc11.org/, where you will also find the newsletter archive. Further, many thanks to Dimos Karatzas and Gernot Fink for entrusting me with this new task within the TC11 leadership team. I am inheriting a lot of best practices and will do my best to keep up the good work.

As it is the tradition, let me briefly introduce myself. I did my PhD in Bern, Switzerland, at the IAM under the guidance of Horst Bunke, who gently introduced me to the TC11 community. My postdoctoral time I spent in Montreal, Canada, where I had the great pleasure to work with Ching Suen at CENPARMI and with Réjean Plamondon at SCRIBENS. Afterwards, I joined the DIVA group in Fribourg, Switzerland, as senior researcher and lecturer. Since 2016, I am Professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Fribourg, where I am continuing to pursue research in the exciting world of TC11.

ICDAR 2019. This January newsletter is under the sign of the fast-approaching paper submission deadline (Feb. 15) for our flagship conference ICDAR 2019. You will also find first announcements about satellite workshops, competitions, awards, and the call for proposals to host ICDAR 2023.

Other submission opportunities include the IGS 2019 conference (submission deadline Feb. 28), a special issue in the Pattern Recognition Letters journal on “DLVTA: Deep Learning for Video Text Analysis” (submission period Feb. 1 - Feb. 28), and a special issue in the Pattern Recognition journal on “Scene Text Reading and its Applications (STRA)” (submission period Feb. 15 - March 31).

To contribute news items, please send me a short email. Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC11 community.

Andreas Fischer, TC11 Communications Officer
( andreas.fischer@hefr.ch )

Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC11 community, please consider joining the TC11 mailing list. Follow us on Twitter (iapr_tc11): https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11

ICDAR2019.png

Message from the TC Chair


We start 2019 with quite a few changes in the leadership team of TC11, so I thought it would be good to introduce you the new members.

Michael Blumenstein has volunteered to help the TC with the educational activities, taking over this portfolio from Gernot Fink. So Michael is the person you should contact for anything related to the Doctoral Consortium or the TC10/11 Summer School. Part of his responsibilities will be to collect the material presented in tutorials at TC11 events, so if you are organising a tutorial in ICDAR, ICFHR or DAS expect to be contacted by him.

As you have already noticed from this newsletter’s introductory message, Andreas Fischer is taking over the TC11 communications from Richard Zanibbi. Richard stepped down after more than two years of managing TC11’s newsletter, twitter account and Web page. Apart from consistently collecting all the relevant content, I am sure you have all noticed the changes in the look and feel that Richard implemented, and hopefully you are already following us on twitter (if not you can still do it: [@IAPR_TC11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11)). Andreas will follow up with all these for the rest of this term, if you need to communicate anything to the community, please contact him.

Andreas is leaving behind the datasets curation post that will be picked up by Joseph Chazalon. The collection of TC11 resources is growing bigger every year. All TC11 related resources are managed through our specific portal: ( http://tc11.cvc.uab.es/ ) so if you have anything to share with the world, please check this out and feel free to contact Joseph for help.

Many thanks to the outgoing officers for all their efforts over the past, and a warm welcome to the new volunteers on the TC11 leadership team!


Dates and Deadlines


Deadlines

2019

Upcoming Conferences and Events

2019

  • IGS 2019, Cancún, Mexico (June 9-13, 2019)
  • ICDAR 2019, Sydney, Australia (September 22-25, 2019)

2020 and Later

  • ICFHR 2020. Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020)
  • DAS 2020. Wuhan, China (May 17-20, 2020)
  • ICPRAI 2020. Zhongshan, China (May 12-15, 2020)
  • ICFHR 2022. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022)


Datasets


TC11 maintains a collection of datasets that can be found online in the TC11 Datasets Repository.

Recently added datasets include:

If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to share with the research community, please use the online upload form. For questions and support, please contact the TC11 Dataset Curator.

Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)
( joseph.chazalon@lrde.epita.fr )


Conferences


ICDAR 2019: Call for Papers (repost)

The 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition will be held in Sydney, Australia from September 20-25, 2019. ICDAR is the premier international gathering for researchers, scientist and practitioners in the document analysis community.

Important Dates 

Feb 15, 2019  Paper Submission Deadline
May 15, 2019  Author Notification
Jun 15, 2019  Camera-Ready Papers Due

ICDAR was established nearly three decades ago, and is endorsed by IAPR-TC 10/11. The 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019) is being organised by University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia and will be held at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Sydney. The conference General Chairs are Michael Blumenstein and Umapada Pal.

Accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society’s Conference Publishing Services (CPS) and included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Topics of Interest include, but not limited to:

  • Document Image Processing
  • Physical and logical layout analysis
  • Character and text recognition
  • Pen‐based document analysis
  • Historical document analysis
  • Document analysis systems
  • Symbol and graphics recognition
  • Document forensics
  • Human document interaction
  • Scene text detection and recognition
  • Document retrieval
  • Signature verification and writer identification
  • Multimedia documents
  • Performance evaluation
  • Machine learning for document analysis
  • Applications of document analysis
  • Cognitive issues of documents
  • Semantic information extraction from documents
  • Document summarization classification and translation
  • Document simulation and synthesis

Submission and Review

ICDAR 2019 will follow a double blind review process. Authors should not include their names and affiliations anywhere in the manuscript. Authors should also ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their previous work in the third person, and omitting including acknowledgements until the camera-ready version.

Paper format and length

Papers accepted for the conference will be allocated 6 pages in the proceedings, with the option of purchasing up to 2 extra pages for AUD 100 per page. This will have to be paid after paper acceptance and at the time of registration. The length of the submitted manuscript should match that intended for final publication. Therefore, if you are unwilling or unable to pay the extra charge you should limit your paper to 6 pages. Otherwise the page limit is 8 pages.

Cheng-Lin Liu, Andreas Dengel, and Rafael Lins, ICDAR 2019 Program Chairs
( liucl@nlpr.ia.ac.cn, dengel@dfki.uni-kl.de, rdl@ufpe.br )

IGS 2019: Call for Papers

The 19th International Graphonomics Conference (IGS 2019) will be held in Cancún, Mexico from June 9-13, 2019.

Important Dates 

Feb 28, 2019  Paper submission
Mar 29, 2019  Author Notification
Apr 29, 2019  Camera-Ready Papers Due

For more information about the International Graphonomics Society, please visit https://graphonomics.net.

The Conference theme is “Graphonomics and Your Brain on Art, Creativity and Innovation” and will be a single track international forum for discussion on recent advances at the intersection of the creative arts, neuroscience, engineering, media, technology, industry, education, design, forensics, and medicine. Participants will convene to review the state of the art, identify challenges and opportunities and create a Roadmap for the field of Graphonomics and Your Brain on Art.

Topics to be addressed include but are not limited to: Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural, Affective and Cognitive Systems in Realistic, Complex Environments; Neural and Behavioral Individuality and Variation; Neuroaesthetics; Creativity and Innovation; Neuroengineering and Brain-Inspired Art, Creative Concepts and Wearable MoBI Designs; Creative Art Therapy; Informal Learning; Education; and Forensics. Findings, including contributed papers and discussions, will appear in a peer-reviewed special issue on Graphonomics and your Brain on Art.

Jose L Contreras-­Vidal, IGS 2019 General Chair
( jlcontreras-vidal@uh.edu )

ICPRAI 2020: Preliminary Call for Papers, Exhibitions, and Sponsors (repost)

ICPRAI 2020
Zhongshan City, May 12-15, 2020
http://www.icprai2020.com and https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~icprai20
Contact:
Secretariat: icprai2020@cenparmi.concordia.ca

Following the success of the First ICPRAI (http://www.icprai2018.com), in Montreal, Canada, CENPARMI (Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence) of Concordia University will organize a second ICPRAI in 2020 in Zhongshan, China in collaboration with its scientific and cultural communities. Zhongshan is a hub in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. It is the hometown of great historical figure Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, and has emerged as a beautiful city of innovation and vitality. Hosted in Zhongshan City, ICPRAI 2020 is organized by CENPARMI and journal editors/scientists:

Ching Y. Suen, Yuan Y. Tang, Edwin Hancock, Patrick Wang, Farida Cheriet, Cheng-Lin Liu, Yue Lu, Nicole Vincent, Pong C. Yuen; Igor Gurevich, Xiaoyi Jiang, Adam Krzyzak, Seong-Whan Lee, Jay Liebowitz, Qin Lu, Umapada Pal, Kam-Fai Wong, plus numerous prominent leaders and researchers from China and the International Community.

Technical Session Tracks

  • Track 1: Recognition of different types of patterns, handwriting, document, text, face, fingerprint, iris, brain, and strategic objects and targets.
  • Track 2: Computer vision and image processing, bio-medical analysis, 2D and 3D images and graphics, healthcare and tomography, audio/video, and multimedia applications.
  • Track 3: Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, SVM, deep learning and classification techniques, language processing, semantic analysis, computational linguistics, e-learning and innovative teaching methods.
  • Track 4: Security and forensic studies, mobile applications, big data, small sample size, supercomputing, data mining and performance evaluation, intelligent systems and practical applications.
  • Track 5: Industrial Applications of PRAI, intellectual properties and ownership, innovation and technology transfer, financial trends and analysis, traffic analysis and smart transportation systems, robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Publication Notes:
Best papers will be selected for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. Papers of general interest will be considered for new books in the Book Series of Language Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Intelligent Systems (http://www.worldscientific.com/series/scpl), and depending on the submissions, we may also propose Special Issues to other journals on papers of special interest on emerging topics.

Nicola Nobile, ICPRAI Secretariat
( icprai2020@cenparmi.concordia.ca )


ICDAR: Awards and Proposals


Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2019 Awards

Important Dates 

May 1, 2019  Nominations Due

Submission Method: email to dimos@cvc.uab.es / afornes@cvc.uab.es

The 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 profession

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 key note speech at the ICDAR 2019 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference.

Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2019 Awards in both categories.

The nomination packet should include the following:

  1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate.
  2. A brief vitae (2 pages) of the nominee highlighting the accomplishments being recognized.
  3. 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.

Submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed.

Please send nominations packets electronically to the Awards Committee Co-Chairs Dimosthenis Karatzas (dimos@cvc.uab.es) and Alicia Fornes (afornes@cvc.uab.es). The deadline for receipt of nominations is May 1st, 2019 but early submissions are strongly encouraged.

The final decision will be made by the Awards Committee which is composed of the ICDAR advisory board and the previous awardees.

ICDAR Advisory Board

Call for Proposals to host ICDAR 2023

Important Dates 

Jun 1, 2019  Proposals Due

Submission Method: email to dimos@cvc.uab.es / afornes@cvc.uab.es

The ICDAR Advisory Board is seeking proposals to host the 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held in 2023 (ICDAR2023).

ICDAR is the premier IAPR event in the field of Document Analysis and Recognition with 300 to 500 participants. The aim of this conference is to bring together international experts to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all areas of Document Analysis and Recognition.

Any consortium interested in making a proposal to host an ICDAR should first familiarise themselves with the “Guidelines for Organizing and Bidding to Host ICDAR” document which is available on the TC10 and TC11 websites (iapr-tc10.univ-lr.fr and www.iapr-tc11.org, respectively).

A link to the most current version of the guidelines appears below. Small updates in the guidelines are expected during the next few weeks, so please check on the Web site of TC11 for the latest version. http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/images/ICDAR_Guidelines_2016_02_27.pdf

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 America are 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 Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas at dimos@cvc.uab.es and Dr. Alicia Fornes at afornes@cvc.uab.es by June 1, 2019.

ICDAR Advisory Board


ICDAR 2019: Workshops


GREC 2019: First Announcement

The 13th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2019), organized by the IAPR TC10, will be held in September 20-21, 2019 (Sydney, Australia) in conjunction with ICDAR 2019.

Important Dates 

May 20, 2019  Paper Submission Deadline
Jun 15, 2019  Author Notification
Jun 30, 2019  Camera-Ready Papers Due

The GREC workshops provide 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. 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.

Three special sessions will focus on : Music Scores Recognition, Comics Analysis and Understanding Sketch Recognition and Understanding. We encourage authors to submit papers on these topics, but papers on other GR topics are also welcome.

Jean-Christophe Burie, GREC 2019 General Chair
( jcburie@univ-lr.fr )


ICDAR 2019: Competitions


List of ICDAR 2019 Competitions

ICDAR2019 will organize a set of competitions dedicated to a large set of document analysis problems. The list of accepted competitions can be accessed online.

Category: Handwritten Historical Document Layout Recognition

Category: Historical Handwritten Script Analysis

  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts (A. Schoonbaert et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Recognition of Early Indian Printed Documents (T. Derrick et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Historical Document Reading Challenge on Large Structured Family Records (F. Liwicki et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Documents (V. Christlein)

Category: Document Recognition (Layout analysis & Text Recognition)

  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Table Detection and Recognition in Archival Documents (H. Déjean et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Table Recognition (L. Gao et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Scanned Receipts OCR and Information Extraction (Z. Huang et al.)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Form Understanding in Noisy Scanned Documents
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Recognition of Documents with Complex Layouts

Category: Handwriting recognition

Category: Document Image Binarization

  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Binarization of Handwritten, printed, or mobile captured Documents (R. Lins)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Document Image Binarization (I. Pratikakis et al.)

Category: Robust Reading

Category: Post-OCR Correction

Category: Chart Parsing

  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Chart Elements Parsing (C. Tensmeyer)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Harvesting Raw Tables from Infographics (R. Setlur)

Category: Miscellaneous Competitions

  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Fine-Grained Classification of comic characters (J.-C. Burie)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Object Detection and Recognition in Floorplan images (M. Luqman)
  • ICDAR 2019 Competition on Signature Verification for On-Line Random Forgeries (Gergely Hanczar)

Marcus Liwicki and Luiz Eduarde S. Olivera, ICDAR2019 Competition Chairs
( marcus.liwicki@ltu.se, lesoliveira@inf.ufpr.br )

Call for Participation: ICDAR 2019 CROHME + TFD Competition

The 6th Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME) and Typeset Formula Detection (TFD) will be organized in conjunction with ICDAR 2019.

Important Dates 

Feb 28, 2019  Release of training set
Mar 15, 2019  Registration deadline
Apr  1, 2019  Release of test set
Apr 30, 2019  Result submission due
May 15, 2019  Initial submission of competition reports

During its history, the CROHME competition has become the standard benchmark for comparing online handwritten math recognition systems. An IJDAR paper summarizing the systems and findings from the first four years of the competition is available, along with publications summarizing the outcome of each competition in ICFHR and ICDAR (2011-2014, 2016). Currently, the CROHME dataset is used by research groups from around the world.

This new instance of the CROHME competition will have three main tasks. As in previous CROHMEs, the first task concerns the recognition of isolated handwritten formulas. There will be a new task for offline handwritten formula recognition from images. Finally, we will have a new task for detecting formulas in document pages.

Task Overview

1.) Online handwritten formula recognition: Expression recognition from strokes. Subtasks:

    1. Isolated math symbol recognition
    1. Parsing expressions from valid symbol locations and labels

2.) Offline handwritten formula recognition: Expression recognition from images. Subtasks:

    1. Isolated math symbol recognition
    1. Parsing expressions from valid symbol locations and labels

3.) Detection of formulas in document pages. Subtasks:

    1. From raw images of document pages
    1. From provided symbol locations and labels

Subtasks 1-a)/2-a) and 1-b)/2-b) are provided to observe the behavior of symbol recognition and relationship parsing in isolation, without the additional complexity of symbol segmentation and recognition.

Awards. Awards will be provided for each of the main tasks, based on expression and detection rates.

Data and Submission

The CROHME organizers will provide an expanded training set, along with a new test set. Participants are welcome to enhance/expand the provided training data, or use additional data for their systems. Submissions will be made using an online system: recognition results will be uploaded through the site, and then the leaderboard will be updated automatically.

CROHME 2019 Organizers

Questions

Please, send questions, concerns or comments about the competition to: crohme2019@cs.rit.edu


Journals


Pattern Recognition Letters Special Issue on DLVTA: Deep Learning for Video Text Analysis

Important Dates: 

Feb 1 - Feb 28, 2019   Paper Submission Period

We are living in a world where we are seamlessly surrounded by multimedia content: text, image, audio, video etc. Much of it is due to the advancement in multimodal sensor technology. For example, intelligent video-capturing devices capture data about how we live and what we do, using surveillance and action cameras as well as smart phones. These enable us to record videos at an unprecedented scale and pace, embedded with exceedingly rich information and knowledge. Now the challenge is to mine such massive visual data to obtain valuable insight about what is happening in the world. Due to the remarkable successes of deep learning techniques, new research initiates are taken to boost video analysis performance significantly.

Deep learning is a new field of machine learning research, to design models and learning algorithms for deep neural networks. Due to the ability of learning from big data and the superior representation and prediction performance, deep learning has gained great successes in various applications of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, including video processing, character and text recognition, image segmentation, object detection and recognition, face recognition, traffic sign recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, to name a few.

Deep video analytics, or video text analytics with deep learning, is becoming an emerging research area in the field of pattern recognition. It is important to understand the opportunities and challenges emerging in video text analysis with deep learning techniques, identify key tasks and evaluate the state of the art, showcase innovative methodologies and ideas, introduce large scale real systems or applications, as well as propose new real-world datasets and discuss future directions. This virtual special issue will offer a coordinated collection of research updates in the broad fields ranging from computer vision, multimedia, text processing to machine learning. We solicit original research and survey papers addressing the synergy of video understanding, text analysis and deep learning techniques. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Deep learning for video text segmentation
  • Deep learning for video text analysis
  • Deep learning for character and text recognition in video
  • Deep learning for scene text detection and recognition
  • Deep learning for text retrieval from video
  • Deep learning for graphics and symbol recognition in video
  • Video categorization based on text
  • Deep learning for other CBDAR tasks, etc.

Guest Editors:

  • Prof. Umapada Pal (Managing Guest Editor), CVPR Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, umapada@isical.ac.in
  • Dr. Subhadip Basu, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, subhadip@cse.jdvu.ac.in
  • Prof. Ujjwal Maulik, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, umaulik@cse.jdvu.ac.in

Pattern Recognition Special Issue on Scene Text Reading and its Applications (STRA) (repost)

Important Dates: 

Feb 15 - Mar 31, 2019   Paper Submission Period

Text in scenes is an important source of information, since it conveys high-level semantics and is almost seen everywhere. These unique traits make scene text reading, involving automated detection and recognition of texts in scene images and videos, a very active research topic in the communities of computer vision, pattern recognition, and multimedia. Recently, these communities have observed a significant surge of research interests and efforts regarding the topic of Scene Text Reading, which is evidenced by the huge number of participants and submissions of ICDAR competitions as well as papers published on top journals and conferences.

Meanwhile, various real-world applications, such as product search, augmented reality, video indexing and autonomous driving, have formed strong demands for technique and systems that can effectively and efficiently extract and understand textual information in scene images and videos. This special issue will feature original research papers related to the theories, ideas, algorithms and systems for Scene Text Reading, together with applications to real-world problems.

The topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:

  • Basic theories and representations regarding text in natural scenes
  • Scene text detection methods for scene images
  • Scene text recognition methods for scene images
  • End-to-end reading systems for scene images
  • Text detection and recognition in born-digital images
  • Text detection, recognition and tracking in videos
  • Script identification in the wild
  • Text information mining from web images and videos
  • Quality assessment and text image/video restoration methods
  • Benchmark datasets and performance evaluation methods
  • Applications related to scene text understanding
  • Survey papers on scene text understanding

Guest Editors:

IJDAR: Latest Issue (Vol. 21, Issue 4) (repost)

The December 2018 issue of IJDAR has been released. Click on the links below to go directly to the Springer Link page for each article.

Table of Contents

  1. Building efficient CNN architecture for offline handwritten Chinese character recognition. Zhiyuan Li, Nanjun Teng, Min Jin & Huaxiang Lu
  2. A comprehensive study of hybrid neural network hidden Markov model for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition. Zi-Rui Wang, Jun Du, Wen-Chao Wang, Jian-Fang Zhai & Jin-Shui Hu
  3. Augmented incremental recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions. Khanh Minh Phan, Anh Duc Le, Bipin Indurkhya & Masaki Nakagawa
  4. A combined strategy of analysis for the localization of heterogeneous form fields in ancient pre-printed records. Aurélie Lemaitre, Jean Camillerapp, Cérès Carton & Bertrand Coüasnon
  5. KERTAS: dataset for automatic dating of ancient Arabic manuscripts. Kalthoum Adam, Asim Baig, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Ahmed Bouridane & Sherine El-Menshawy

MDPI Journal of Imaging: Special Issue on Document Image Processing (repost)

The MDPI Journal of Imaging Special Issue on Document Image Processing has been released! The Guest editors are Ergina Kavallieratou and Laurence Likforman-Sulem. All articles are open access, and may be downloaded from the link below:

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special_issues/document_image_processing

Table of Contents

  1. Editorial: Document Image Processing

(L. Likforman Sulem and E. Kavallieratou)

  1. Non-Local Sparse Image Inpainting for Document Bleed-Through Removal

(Muhammad Hanif, Anna Tonazzini, Pasquale Savino and Emanuele Salerno)

  1. A New Binarization Algorithm for Historical Documents

(Marcos Almeida, Rafael Dueire Lins, Rodrigo Bernardino, Darlisson Jesus and Bruno Lima)

  1. Slant Removal Technique for Historical Document Images

(Ergina Kavallieratou, Laurence Likforman-Sulem and Nikos Vasilopoulos)

  1. Text/Non-Text Separation from Handwritten Document Images Using LBP Based Features: An Empirical Study

(Sourav Ghosh, Dibyadwati Lahiri, Showmik Bhowmik, Ergina Kavallieratou and Ram Sarkar)

  1. A Holistic Technique for an Arabic OCR System

(Farhan M. A. Nashwan, Mohsen A. A. Rashwan, Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy, Sherif M. Abdou and Abdullah M. Moussa)

  1. Efficient Query Specific DTW Distance for Document Retrieval with Unlimited Vocabulary

(Gattigorla Nagendar, Viresh Ranjan, Gaurav Harit and C. V. Jawahar)

  1. Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition Using Layer-Wise Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Adaptive Gradient Methods

(Mahesh Jangid and Sumit Srivastava)

  1. Benchmarking of Document Image Analysis Tasks for Palm Leaf Manuscripts from Southeast Asia

(Made Windu Antara Kesiman, Dona Valy, Jean-Christophe Burie, Erick Paulus, Mira Suryani, Setiawan Hadi, Michel Verleysen, Sophea Chhun and Jean-Marc Ogier)

  1. Transcription of Spanish Historical Handwritten Documents with Deep Neural Networks

(Emilio Granell, Edgard Chammas, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Carlos-D. Martínez-Hinarejos, Chafic Mokbel and Bogdan-Ionuţ Cîrste)

  1. A Study of Different Classifier Combination Approaches for Handwritten Indic Script Recognition

(Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Pawan Kumar Singh, Ram Sarkar and Mita Nasipuri)

  1. DocCreator: A New Software for Creating Synthetic Ground-Truthed Document Images

(Nicholas Journet, Muriel Visani, Boris Mansencal, Kieu Van-Cuong and Antoine Billy)

  1. Open Datasets and Tools for Arabic Text Detection and Recognition in News Video Frames

(Oussama Zayene, Sameh Masmoudi Touj, Jean Hennebert, Rolf Ingold and Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara)

Ergina Kavallieratou, Guest Editor, MDPI Special Issue on Document Image Processing
( kavallieratou@aegean.gr )

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti and Simone Marinai, IJDAR Editors-in-Chief
( kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp, lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu, simone.marinai@unifi.it )


Books


New Book on Graphics Recognition (by KC Santosh) (repost)

KC Santosh, Document Image Analysis: Current Trends and Challenges in Graphics Recognition, Springer, 2018. ISBN: 978-981-13-2338-6.
URL: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-13-2339-3

Table of Contents

  1. Document Image Analysis
  2. Graphics Recognition
  3. Graphics Recognition and Validation Protocol
  4. Statistical Approaches
  5. Structural Approaches
  6. Hybrid Approaches
  7. Syntactic Approaches
  8. Conclusion and Challenges

Description (taken from the Foreward by Jean-Marc Ogier):

The book starts with a clear and concise overview of document image analysis; the author puts a position about where does graphics processing lie (Chap. 1), which is immediately followed by graphics recognition (Chap. 2) in detail. The best part of the book is it summarizes the rich state-of-the-art techniques in addition to those international contests that have been happening in every 2 years since the 90s. This summary helps readers understand the scope and importance of graphics recognition in the domain. Another important issue is the author framed the need for validation protocol (Chap. 3) so that it allows a fair comparison that let us review our advancements then and now. Three different fundamental approaches, viz. statistical (Chap. 4), structural (Chap. 5), and syntactic (Chap. 7), are comprehensively described for graphics recognition by taking state-of-the-art (up to date) research techniques in addition to the hybrid approaches (Chap. 6). For a complex graphics recognition problem, structural approaches are found to be appropriate and have been well covered in the book. Interestingly, even though there exist a few works on the syntactic approach for graphical symbol recognition, the author sets a position and its importance as the image description happens to be close to human understanding language. The summary of the book (Chap. 8) is succinct and to the point […] I strongly believe the book has the potential to attract a large audience.


Careers


Faculty Positions at the University of Michigan (USA) (repost)

Come work with us! The University of Michigan School of Information is hiring tenure-track faculty in multiple areas this year. We also have an outstanding Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship program that can serve as a fast track to assistant professor.

Please see the links below - for questions about any of these positions, please contact the chair of the faculty search committee, Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson (kevynct@umich.edu).

  • Tenure-track faculty positions in data science
  • Tenure-track faculty positions in digital curation and archival studies
  • Tenure-track faculty position in social media
  • U-M Presidential Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP)

General UMSI faculty job openings:

https://www.si.umich.edu/get-involved/faculty-job-openings

The University generally seeks applicants whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education. The program is particularly interested in scholars with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their non-traditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.

The mission of the School of Information is to create and share knowledge to help people use information – with technology – to build a better world. A successful candidate will be committed to, and will directly contribute to our goal of being the best research and teaching institution for the understanding and design of information and its technologies in service of people and society.

The School is home to vibrant research and teaching programs, with 50 FTE professors, and over 800 students. We offer four degrees: a Ph.D.; a Master of Science in Information; a Master of Health Informatics; and a Bachelor of Science in Information. In the fall of 2019 we expect to launch a new online degree: Master of Applied Data Science.

Founded in 1817, the University of Michigan has a long and distinguished history as one of the first public universities in the nation. It is one of only two public institutions consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten universities. The University has one of the largest health care complexes in the world and one of the best library systems in the United States. With more than $1 billion in research expenditures annually, the University has the second largest research expenditure among all universities in the nation. The University has an annual general fund budget of more than $2.1 billion and an endowment valued at more than $10.9 billion.

U-M EEO/AA Statement: The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.


Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Chair of the Faculty Search Committee
( kevynct@umich.edu )

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) (repost)

IAPR’s Industrial Liaison Committee 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:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/IAPR/INDUSTRIAL

Bob Fisher, Chair, IAPR Industrial Liason Committee
( rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk )


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Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, Andreas Fischer ([1]). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC-11 community.

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