IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2017 01 29

IAPR TC-11 Homepage: http://www.iapr-tc11.org.

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi (rxzvcs@rit.edu). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC-11 community.

Subscription: This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To join the TC-11 mailing list, please send an email to the editor at: rxzvcs@rit.edu. To manage your subscription, please visit the mailing list homepage: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11.

Message from the Chair: New Leadership, Twitter, and Datasets

TC-11 was one of the first IAPR TCs that introduced a larger “leadership” team including more volunteers apart from the chair and vice-chair. Continuing with this good practice, I am pleased to present you the new leadership team for the next term.

TC-11 Leadership Team (2017-2019)

• Chair: Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Centre, Spain)
• Vice-Chair: Dr. Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan)
• Dataset Curator: Dr. Andreas Fischer (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
• Communications Officer: Dr. Richard Zanibbi (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
• Education Officer: Prof. Gernot A. Fink (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
• Past Chair: Prof. Koichi Kise (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan)

I never quite liked the term leadership in this context. After all, our job as volunteers is to serve the community: provide continuity and facilitate the community in whatever the community wants to do. I suppose that a facilitating team does not sound good, so we’ll stick with leadership in the lack of any better term. In any case, one of our primary responsibilities is to listen, and try to define the roadmap of the community together with all the TC-11 members. Any idea you have about how to make TC-11 more useful, and how our activities may evolve with time would be more than welcome! Also, feel free to contact us by email at iaprtc11@gmail.com.

Apart from the monthly email newsletter, we have established a twitter account that hopefully will be more useful for immediate and direct communication. Do follow [@IAPR_TC11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) and make sure you send us any opinions or information worth spreading.

Feel free also to share any useful resources you have with the community. I remind you that TC-11 can host datasets and other online resources you might want to share – just visit the TC-11 web page and follow the links to the datasets (direct link: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets ).

Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Chair
(dimos@cvc.uab.es)

Message from the Editor: Introduction, Thanks, and Requests

Hello, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Richard Zanibbi, the new TC-11 newsletter editor. I am also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, where I direct the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab. I'm originally from Canada, and completed my PhD at Queen's University (Kingston) followed by nearly two years at CENPARMI in Montréal before moving to RIT (and the USA) in 2006.

I would like to thank Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas for inviting me to serve as the TC-11 Communications Officer, Prof. Gernot Fink, who edited this newsletter with great skill for years and has been very helpful as I transition into this new role, and Dr. Masakazu Iwamura for his invaluable help with this newsletter and the TC-11 web pages. Thanks also to others who helped me sort out the contents for this newsletter, including Dr. Andreas Fischer and Prof. Marcus Liwicki. I am grateful for this opportunity, and I look forward to serving the TC-11 community.

I want to ask everyone to please send any pertinent news items to share by email rxzvcs@rit.edu, and to consider sharing our newsletter with those outside of TC-11 who may be interested. Let's keep our community strong by keeping both our community and other communities informed of our activities.

Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer
(rxzvcs@rit.edu)

Dates and Deadlines

• Jan. 31, 2017: Proposal for Hosting: DAS 2018 (Fall 2018)
• Feb. 5, 2017: IGS 2017, Gaeta, Italy (June 18-21, 2017)
  (http://www.graphonomics.org/igs2017)
• April 8, 2017: GCPR 2017, Basel, Switzerland (September 13-15, 2017) (https://gcpr2017.dmi.unibas.ch/en)
• March 15, 2017: ICDAR 2017, Kyoto, Japan (November 10-15, 2017) (http://www.iapr.org/icdar2017)
• March 2, 2018: ICFHR 2018, Rochester, USA (August 6-8, 2018) (http://www.cs.rit.edu/~icfhr2018)
• Nov. 15, 2018: ICPRAI 2018, Montreal, Canada (May 14-17,2018)
  (http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~icprai18/index.html)
• Upcoming: ICFHR 2020, Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020)

Call for Proposals: DAS 2018   (Repost)

Following the successful organisation of the 12th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems in Santorini (Greece) last April (DAS 2016), by our colleagues Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Basilis Gatos, we are now soliciting proposals for organising and hosting DAS 2018.

The DAS workshop has become one of the signature events for TC-11. DAS 2018 will build on the tradition established by past DAS workshops held in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1994), Malvern, PA (1996), Nagano, Japan (1998), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2000), Princeton, NJ (2002), Florence, Italy (2004), Nelson, New Zealand (2006), Nara, Japan (2008), Boston, MA (2010), and Gold Coast, Australia (2012), Tours-Loire Valley, France (2014), and Santorini, Greece (2016).

Individuals and groups who are interested in Document Analysis Systems are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2018. The event should preferably take place in late summer/fall, but is not limited to this period.

The submission deadline is January 31st, 2017. Proposals should be submitted to the TC-11 chair (Dimosthenis Karatzas) and vice-chair (Masakazu Iwamura).

If you already know whether you are interested in preparing a proposal, please send us your expression of interest. Note that an expression of interest is not a commitment to make a formal proposal nor an official bid. If you need further information concerning DAS, please feel free to contact us.

The final selection among competing proposals will be made short after the deadline by the DAS Steering Committee, which is composed of all those who have themselves organized or contributed substantially to past DAS workshops.

Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Chair
(dimos@cvc.uab.es)
Masakazu Iwamura, TC-11 Vice-chair
(masa@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp)

ICDAR 2017 Competitions : An Overview

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the ICDAR'17 that will be held in Kyoto (November, 10th-15th) will organize a set of competitions dedicated to a large set of document analysis problems. You are cordially invited to participate in this scientific event that will be a very good opportunity to objectively compare the quality of algorithms in different categories of challenges. Please consider submitting your algorithm(s) to all competitions in the same category, as we asked the individual competition organizers to synchronize their evaluation metrics, if possible. You will find below the different categories of competitions, and the URL of their respective website, that will allow you to get all the required information for participating.

• Category : Handwritten Historical Document Layout Recognition
  • Competition on Baseline Detection in Archival Documents : https://scriptnet.iit.demokritos.gr/competitions/5/
  • Competition on Layout Analysis for Challenging Medieval Manuscripts : http://diuf.unifr.ch/main/hisdoc/icdar2017-hisdoc-layout-comp
  • Competition on Historical Book Analysis : http://icdar2017hba.litislab.eu
• Category : Historical Handwritten Script Analysis
  • Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script : http://icfhr2016-clamm.irht.cnrs.fr/icdar-2017/
  • Competition on Historical Document Writer Identification : http://scriptnet.iit.demokritos.gr/competitions/6/
  • Competition on Multi-script Writer Identification Using LAMIS-MSHD and CERUG Databases : https://icdar2017cmswi.sciencesconf.org/
• Category : Character/Word Spotting
  • Competition on Query-by-Example Glyph Spotting of Southeast Asian Palm Leaf Manuscript Images : http://amadi.univ-lr.fr/ICDAR2017_Competition/
  • Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition : TBA
• Category : Handwriting Recognition
  • Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on the READ Dataset : https://scriptnet.iit.demokritos.gr/competitions/4/
  • Competition on Information Extraction in Historical Handwritten Records : http://www.cvc.uab.es/5cofm/competition/
• Category : Document Image Binarization
  • Document Image Binarization Competition : https://vc.ee.duth.gr/dibco2017/
• Category : Document Recognition (Layout analysis & Text Recognition)
  • Competition on Recognition of Documents with Complex Layouts : http://www.primaresearch.org/RDCL2017/
  • Competition on Early Indian Printed Documents : http://www.primaresearch.org/REID2017/
  • Competition on Page Object Detection in Document Images : http://www.icst.pku.edu.cn/cpdp/ICDAR2017_PODCompetition/index.html
• Category : Document Document Reconstruction
  • Smartphone-captured Document Image Reconstruction from Multiple Views : http://smartdoc.univ-lr.fr
• Category : Post OCR Correction
  • Competition on Post-OCR Text Correction : http://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/ICDAR2017PostOCR
• Category : Robust Reading Competitions
  • Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild : http://mclab.eic.hust.edu.cn/icdar2017chinese/
  • Challenge on COCO-Text : http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=5
  • Challenge on Text Extraction from Biomedical Literature Figures : http://prir.ustb.edu.cn/DeTEXT/ICDAR2017Competition/
  • Challenge on Robust Reading Challenge on Omnidirectional Video : http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=7
  • Competition on Multi-lingual scene text detection and script identification : http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=8
• Category : Text in Video
  • Competition on Arabic Text Detection and Recognition in Multiresolution Video Frames ̶ AcTiVComp’17 : http://diuf.unifr.ch/diva/AcTiVComp/index.html
  • Competition on Video Script Identification : TBA
• Category : Forensics
  • Competition on File Type and Altered Image Identification : http://icsdweb.aegean.gr/icdar2017
• Category : Miscellaneous Competitions
  • Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text : http://diuf.unifr.ch/diva/APTI/competitionICDAR2017.html

Looking forward to meeting you in Kyoto,
Kind regards,
Marcus Liwicki & Jean-Marc Ogier
(liwicki@cs.uni-kl.de, president.larochelle@univ-lr.fr)

ICDAR 2017: Accepted Workshops and Tutorials

Nine workshops and three tutorials will be offered at ICDAR 2017. You can find the names and organizers for each below. Please direct any questions to the workshop and/or tutorial chairs (contact information is provided below).

Workshops

• HDI 2017: First International Workshop on Human-Document Interaction
  

Jean-Christophe Burie, Mickaël Coustaty, Dimosthenis Karatzas and Koichi Kise

• CBDAR 2017: 7th International Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition
  

Lluis Gomez-Bigorda, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman and Dimosthenis Karatzas

• MANPU 2017: 2nd International Workshop on coMics Analysis, Processing and Understanding
  

Jean-Christophe Burie, Toshihiko Yamasaki and Motoi Iwata

• WML ICDAR: Workshop on Machine Learning
  

Umapada Pal and Eric Granger

• HIP 2017: 4th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing
  

Andreas Fischer, Angelika Garz, Kengo Terasawa and Bill Barrett

• IWCDF 2017: 1st International Workshop on Computational Document Forensics
  

Jean-Marc Ogier, Utpal Garain and Apostolos Antonacopoulos

• ICDAR-OST: 1st International Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis
  

Marcel Würsch and Joseph Chazalon

• GREC: 12th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition
  

Alicia Fornés and Bart Lamiroy

• MOCR: 6th International Workshop on Multilingual OCR
  

Venu Govindaraju, Prem Natarajan, Santanu Chaudhury and Srirangaraj Setlur

Tutorials

Each of tutorial will last half a day.

• RTRS: Building a Robust Text Reading System for Unconstrained Scene Images
  

Zhizhong Su and Chengquan Zhang

• GMPRDIA: Graph-based Methods in Pattern Recognition and Document Image Analysis
  

Anjan Dutta, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, Josep Lladós Canet, Jean-Marc OGIER

• WS: Word Spotting: From Bag-of-Features to Deep Learning
  

Gernot A. Fink

Michael Blumenstein and Umapada Pal, ICDAR 2017 Workshop Chairs
(Michael.Blumenstein@uts.edu.au, umapada@isical.ac.in)
Simone Marinai and Josep Llados, ICDAR 2017 Tutorial Chairs
(simone.marinai@unifi.it, josep@cvc.uab.es)

IGS 2017: Paper Submission Deadline Extension (Feb. 5th, 2017)

We are pleased to announce the eighteenth edition of the biennial Conference of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS) that will take place from 18 to 21 June 2017 in Gaeta, along the central western coast of Italy. The Conference theme is "Graphonomics for e-citizens: e-health, e-society, e-education" and will be a single track international forum for discussion on recent advances in the fields of science and technology of handwriting and other graphic skills, and their impact on the daily life within the e-society.

Important dates:

• Paper submission: February 5, 2017
• Author notification: March 15, 2017
• Camera-ready version: April 30, 2017
• Author registration: April 30, 2017

Topics of interest (but not limited to) are:

• Neuroscience: Development, planning and control of writing and drawing movement;
• Handwriting generation: Biomechanical models; Cognitive models; Neural network based models;
• Handwriting analysis: Recording; Tracking; Processing; Tools;
• Handwriting recognition: Human reading; Pen computing; On-line and off-line recognition; Interface technology;
• Handwriting education: Handwriting and drawing skill evaluation; Teaching handwriting; Learning handwriting;
• Medical applications: Handwriting disorders; Disorders and drugs; Brain-computer interfacing;
• Forensic applications: Handwriting features; Writer identification and verification; Signature verification; Methods and Computer Tools (e.g. personnel screening devices, etc.);
• Cultural Heritage applications: Historical document analysis and processing; Palaeography; Large digital archives: systems, tools and technologies.

Special Issues

• Pattern Recognition Letters: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the Conference in the fields of Handwriting Analysis and Recognition and Cultural Heritage Applications.
• International Journals of Forensic Document Examination: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the IGS Conference in the field of forensic applications.
• Human Movement Science: a special issue is scheduled in conjunction with the IGS Conference on the same topics of the IGS Conference in the field of Neuroscience and Neural Engineering.

Invited speakers

• Prof. Marc H. Schieber, Head of the Neural Control of Hand and Finger Movements Laboratory, University of Rochester Medical Center, School of Medicine and Dentistry.
• Prof. Oliver Tucha, Head of the Department of Clinical and Developmental Neuropsychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen.
• Dr. Heidi H. Harralson, Managing Partner of Spectrum Forensic International, LLC.

Special Sessions

• "Graphonomics for Cultural Heritage"
• "Sensory and Motor Brain-Machine-Interfaces for Grasping and Manipulation: From Basic to Clinical Applications"

For further information about the Conference, please visit:   http://www.graphonomics.org/igs2017
For more information about the Society, please visit:
  http://www.graphonomics.org

Claudio De Stefano, IGS 2017 General Chair
(destefano@unicas.it)

ICFHR 2018: Moved to Niagara Falls, USA

After much discussion by the ICFHR 2018 conference chairs and with the approval of TC-11, the site for ICFHR 2018 has been moved from Rochester, NY (USA) to Niagara Fall, NY (USA). There are multiple reasons for this change; they include higher value for participants (e.g., better food, meeting rooms and surrounding environs) and Niagara being a more attractive meeting place for existing and potential members of the TC-11 community. The total cost to run the conference, as well as for individual participants should remain the same.

The ICFHR 2018 Call for Papers and Conference Poster are now available - please distribute these to anyone who may be interested. Additional information about important dates, the conference site, travel, the organizing committee, etc. may be found in the ICFHR 2018 web pages.

Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer
(rxzvcs@rit.edu)

Postdoctoral Position in Machine Learning (LITIS, Université de Rouen, France)

The Machine Learning team at LITIS (France) is opening a postdoctoral position for a candidate with a strong experience in Machine Learning, with application to one of the following topics: Speech Processing, Handwriting Processing, Computer Vision, or Document Image Processing.

The candidate will be involved in pursuing the development of Handwriting recognition and document image processing technologies to extend the PlaIR platform that was originally developed for digitizing old Newspapers www.plair.univ-rouen.fr http://www.plair.univ-rouen.fr. New contributions of the candidate are expected regarding Handwriting Recognition (HWR), by combining deep optical models with deep language models. He will contribute with other members of the team to various research projects in this domain.

Scientific and Technical Skills

Experimented engineer or postdoctoral candidates having a strong background in one of the following topics : Neural Networks, Deep Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models, Recurrent Neural Networks, statistical language models, computer vision.

The successful candidate should have advanced programming skills (Python, C/C++, Matlab). Experience of developing models within one of the popular frameworks such as Torch 7, TensorFLow, will be particularly appreciated.

Application

Application should include a curriculum vita, a brief statement of research interests, and the names of at least three references.

Duration: 18 months, starting as soon as possible.
Contact:
Thierry.Paquet@univ-rouen.fr
(Thierry.Paquet@univ-rouen.fr)

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IAPR TC-11 Homepage: http://www.iapr-tc11.org

The IAPR is the International Association for Pattern Recognition. IAPR's Technical Committee No. 11 (TC-11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.