IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2026 01
January, 2026
Click on the buttons below to view sections of the newsletter.
- Message from the Editor
- Dates and Deadlines
- Deadlines
- Upcoming Conferences and Events
- Open Call for Organizing DAR Events *(repost)*
- Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2026)
- ICDAR 2026 - Call for Papers
- Scientific Competitions
- ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains (DocVQA2026)
- Competition News *(repost)*
- ICDAR 2026 Competitions
- ICPR 2026 Competitions
- ICPRAI 2026 Competition Track
- Datasets
- TC11 Datasets Repository
Dear TC11 members,
In this first newsletter issue of 2026, I would like to encourage junior members of our DAR community to register to participate in the 6th edition of the summer school on document analysis, focusing this year on next generation document understanding.
This issue contains the call for papers for our flagship conference ICDAR 2026 and various news on scientific competitions. Participation in competitions is now open for ICDAR and ICPR. Note also that there is a new “competition track” in ICPRAI, where authors may submit 3-page discussion papers.
Happy reading!
Nibal Nayef, TC11 Communication Officer
( n.nayef@gmail.com )
Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC11 community, please consider joining the TC11 mailing list. Follow us on X (Twitter) (iapr_tc11): https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11
Deadlines
2026
- Feb 13 ICDAR abstracts submission (hard deadline)
- Feb 27 ICDAR full papers submission (hard deadline)
- Feb 28 ICPR Tutorial proposals due
- Mar 20 SSDA registration deadline
Upcoming Conferences and Events
2026
- SSDA 2026. Vall de Núria, Catalonia (May 25-29, 2026)
- ICPRAI 2026. Montréal, Québec, Canada (June 15-18, 2026)
- ICPR 2026. Lyon, France (August 17-22, 2026)
- ICDAR 2026. Vienna, Austria (August 30 - September 4, 2026)
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 2029)
- 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; next possibility in 2026)
- GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2027)
- SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (next possibility in 2027)
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 kc.santosh@usd.edu and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.
KC Santosh (Chair, TC10)
Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
This is a call for participation in the 6th edition of the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA).
This year’s SSDA is focused on next-generation Document Understanding, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and structured knowledge representation.
The program combines foundational lectures to hands-on practice sessions and solving real-world industry challenges in collaborative teams.
Five days immersed in document analysis in an extraordinary mountain valley!
Location: Vall de Núria, Catalonia (Transport from Barcelona included in registration fee)
Key dates:
- Pre-registration deadline: March 20
- Acceptance notification: March 28
- Summer School: May 25–29, 2026
For more information, and pre-registration: https://ssdag.cvc.uab.es/
The International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) is the premier scientific venue in the field of document analysis and recognition. This conference brings together international experts from academia and industry to present their latest research results, share their experiences and to promote research and development in all aspects of recognition and analysis of documents, with a particular focus on document image analysis. The 20th edition of this flagship conference will be held as an in person event in Vienna, Austria, from August 30 to September 04, 2026.
Topics:
Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:
Document image processing, Physical and logical layout analysis, Text and symbol recognition, Handwriting recognition, Document analysis systems, Document classification, Indexing and retrieval of documents, Document synthesis, Extracting document semantics, NLP for document image analysis, Office automation, Graphics recognition, Human document interaction, Document Representation Modeling, Private and secure document understanding, Structured document generation, Multimedia document analysis, Mobile text recognition, Pen-based document analysis, Scene text detection and Recognition, Recognition of tables and formulas, Historical document analysis, Signature verification, Document summarization and translation, Document forensics and provenance, Medical document analysis, Document analysis for literature search, Gold-standard benchmarks and datasets, Foundation models for document understanding.
Conference Paper Submissions:
Authors are invited to submit full-length papers describing original work of not more than 17 pages including figures and references.
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. Authors will be given the opportunity to respond to reviews in a rebuttal phase.
Submitted papers must adhere to the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format (Springer Guidelines/Templates). Detailed submission instructions for authors including the submission link can be found in the paper submission instructions.
ICDAR 2026 will give awards for the best paper, the best student paper, best poster paper, and the best industry paper, all of which will be presented at the conference.
Find here the detailed submission instructions: https://icdar2026.org/index.php/paper-submission-instruction/
Important Notes:
Manuscripts not adhering to the page limit (maximum 17 pages all included), the formatting guidelines (Springer Lecture Notes format) or the anonymization requirements will be rejected without review.
Authors wishing to submit their manuscript to a pre-publication service (such as, for example arXiv.org) may do so. Likewise, links to GitHub websites for sharing data and code are permitted. Reviewers will be advised not to attempt to determine the identity of authors by searching for that information within online sources such as this.
The authorship of submitted manuscripts is final. No changes to the list of authors will be allowed once a paper has been submitted!
Dual submissions of manuscripts to other venues in parallel to ICDAR 2026 are prohibited!
Important Dates
- Abstracts Deadline: 13 February 2026
- Full Paper Deadline: 27 February 2026
- Reviews to Authors: 17 April 2026
- Rebuttal Deadline: 24 April 2026
- Acceptance Notification: 15 May 2026
- Camera-ready Deadline: 15 June 2026
All deadlines are strict at 23:59 AOE (Anywhere on Earth). There will be NO EXTENSIONS.
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. Papers need to be presented in person at the conference in order to be included in the published proceedings.
Contact: pc-chairs@icdar2026.org
ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains (DocVQA2026)
Building on the successful DocVQA series of competitions, this new competition aims to test the multi-modal reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models on 8 different document domains: business reports, scientific papers, slides, scientific posters, maps, comics, infographics, and engineering drawings.
Important Dates:
- January 30, 2026: Validation set is published
- March 3, 2026: Test set available on the evaluation server
- April 3, 2026: Competition results deadline
- April 17, 2026: Competition report submission due
- June 22, 2026: Competition winners announced
For more information and to participate: https://www.docvqa.org/challenges/2026
Competition News (repost)
ICDAR 2026 Competitions
ICDAR competitions are now online and open for participation. Please find the list of competitions and their details here:
https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/
ICPR 2026 Competitions
Among the ICPR competitions, there is a competition on “Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition”, the challenge focuses on recognizing license plates in surveillance settings where images are often low-resolution. This involves scientific challenges related to our document analysis field such as: super-resolution of document images, robust Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques, capable of operating effectively despite low-quality input conditions, document image quality assessment and enhancement.
Competition website (full details, rules, and registration):
https://icpr26lrlpr.github.io/
The top five teams will be invited to contribute to the competition summary paper to be published in the ICPR 2026 proceedings.
Competition Organizers:
Rayson Laroca (PPGIa-PUCPR)
Valfride Nascimento (PPGInf-UFPR)
David Menotti (PPGInf-UFPR)
Contact: menotti@inf.ufpr.br
ICPRAI 2026 Competition Track
The 5th ICPRAI is introducing “Competitions” in its Program with three prizes of CAD$500 each, to bridge classical PR methods and modern AI challenges, to raise the awareness of the general public about the important role of “PR”, and to boost the image and visibility of “PR”.
Participants are invited to submit a 3-page discussion paper on one or more of the following topics to our new TRACK “Competition”:
- Why a lot more people know “AI” than “PR”?
- The important role “PR” plays in “AI” applications
- Do “AI” and “PR” really need guardrails? And what about remedies when something goes wrong?
All participants are encouraged to submit discussion papers with illustrations to the competition ‘TRACK’ before February 15, 2026.
Authors of the “Best Discussion Papers” will receive cash prizes and their papers will be displayed at a distinct Notice Board at the conference.
When uploading your paper to EasyChair, select the Competition track.
Organizers: ICPRAI 2026 Best Paper Award Committee
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.
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 (contact information is below).
Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)
( joseph.chazalon@epita.fr )
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/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything
else of interest to the TC-11 community.
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