IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2020 01

January, 2020

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Table of Contents

• Message from the Editor
• Dates and Deadlines
  • Deadlines
  • Upcoming Conferences and Events
• Conferences
  • ICFHR 2020: 2nd Call for Papers
  • Call for Participation: ImageCLEF Hand Drawn UI Challenge
• Datasets
  • TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)*
• Careers
  • IRISA/INSA Rennes (France): Research Engineer/PostDoc Position (1.5 Years)
  • Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) *(repost)*

Message from the Editor

There is one month left to submit a paper to the 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2020), which will take place from September 7-10, 2020, in Dortmund, Germany (including a day for tutorials on September 7).

This year, the CLEF 2020 initiative include a challenge on detection and recognition of hand drawn website UI. Registration is open and the test data will be released in March.

Looking for a PostDoc position? Then please have a look at the open position at IRISA/INSA in Rennes, France, in the career section of this newsletter.

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

Dates and Deadlines

Deadlines

2020

• March 1: Paper submission ICFHR 2020

Upcoming Conferences and Events

2020

• ICPRAI 2020. Zhongshan, China (May 12-15, 2020)
• DAS 2020. TBD (May 17-20, 2020)
• ICFHR 2020. Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020)

2021 and Later

• ICDAR 2021. Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10, 2021)
• ICFHR 2022. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022)

Conferences

ICFHR 2020: 2nd Call for Papers

The 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition
September 7-10, 2020 - Dortmund, Germany
Web page: http://icfhr2020.org
Contact: info@icfhr2020.org

Important Dates

Mar 01    Paper Submission
Jun 08    Author Notifications
Jul 12    Camera-Ready Papers Due

Sep 07    ICFHR Tutorials
Sep 08-10 ICFHR Main Conference

Keynotes

Thomas Deselaers (Google Research, Zurich, Switzerland):
Online Handwriting Recognition and Beyond

Alicia Fornés (Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona):
Recognition of handwritten textual and graphical documents in the deep learning era.

Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra (EPHE, PSL, Paris, France):
Computational Document Analysis: New and Open Questions from a Pragmatic Perspective

Call for Papers

The International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) is the premier scientific venue in the field of handwriting recognition. This conference brings together international experts from academia and industry to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all aspects of handwriting recognition and applications.

Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:

• Handwriting Recognition
• Cursive Script Recognition
• Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition
• Word Spotting
• Handwritten Document Image Processing
• Layout Analysis and Understanding
• Language Models in Handwriting Recognition
• Web-Based Applications
• Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries
• Information Extraction & Retrieval
• Form Processing
• Bank-Check Processing
• Historical Document Processing
• Forensic Studies and Security Issues
• Writer Verification and Identification
• Performance Enhancement and System Evaluation
• Electronic Ink and Pen-Based Systems
• Other Offline and Online Applications

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers of not more than six (6) pages. Papers must describe original work. Paper reviews will be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the ICFHR 2020 web site (http://icfhr2020.org).

Gernot A. Fink and Lambert Schomaker, ICFHR 2020 General Chairs
( info@icfhr2020.org )

PDF Version of the 1st Call for Papers: ICFHR2020-1stCfP.pdf

Call for Participation: ImageCLEF Hand Drawn UI Challenge

Webpage: https://www.imageclef.org/2020/drawnui

Important Dates

Jan 13    Development data release
Mar 16    Test data release
May 11    Run submission
May 25    Working notes submission
Sep 22-25 CLEF 2020 conference, Thessaloniki, Greece

Challenge
Building websites requires a very specific set of skills. Currently, the two main ways to achieve this is either by using a visual website builder or by programming. Both approaches have a steep learning curve. Enabling people to create websites by drawing them on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper would make the webpage building process more accessible.

A first step in capturing the intent expressed by a user through a wireframe is to correctly detect a set of atomic user interface elements (UI) in their drawings. The bounding boxes and labels resulted from this detection step can then be used to accurately generate a website layout using various heuristics.

In this context, the detection and recognition of hand drawn website UIs task addresses the problem of automatically recognizing the hand drawn objects representing website UIs, which are further used to be translated automatically into website code.

Task
Given a set of images of hand drawn UIs, participants are required to develop machine learning techniques that are able to predict the exact position and type of UI elements.

Data set
The provided data set consists of 3,000 hand drawn images inspired from mobile application screenshots and actual web pages containing 1,000 different templates. Each image comes with the manual labeling of the positions of the bounding boxes corresponding to each UI element and its type. To avoid any ambiguity, a predefined shape dictionary with 21 classes is used, e.g., paragraph, label, header. The development set contains 2,000 images while the test set contains 1,000 images.

Metrics
The performance of the algorithms will be evaluated using the standard mean Average Precision over IoU .5, commonly used in object detection.

Register
https://www.imageclef.org/2020

Overall Coordination
Raul Berari, teleportHQ, Cluj Napoca, Romania
Paul Brie, teleportHQ, Cluj Napoca, Romania
Dimitri Fichou, teleportHQ, Cluj Napoca, Romania
Mihai Dogariu, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Liviu Daniel Stefan, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Mihai Gabriel Constantin, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Bogdan Ionescu, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania

Datasets

TC11 Datasets Repository (repost)

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@lrde.epita.fr )

Careers

IRISA/INSA Rennes (France): Research Engineer/PostDoc Position (1.5 Years)

Analysis systems for serial sources in collections of historical image documents

Pdf version:
https://www-intuidoc.irisa.fr/en/postdoc-eurhisfirm

Important Dates

March 1, 2020 - August 31, 2021  Contract period

IRISA - Intuidoc
IRISA is a joint research center for Informatics, including Robotics and Image and Signal Processing. 850 people, 40 teams, explore the world of digital sciences to find applications in healthcare, ecology-environment, cyber-security, transportation, multimedia, and industry. INSA Rennes is one of the 8 trustees of IRISA.

The Intuidoc team (https://www.irisa.fr/intuidoc) conducts research on the topic of document image recognition. Since many years, the team proposes a system, called DMOS-PI method, for document structure analysis of documents. This DMOS-PI method is used for document recognition, or field extraction in archive documents, handwritten contents damaged documents (musical scores, archives, newspapers, letters, electronic schema, etc.).

EURHISFIRM project
EURHISFIRM European project aims at developing a research infrastructure to connect, collect, collate, align, and share reliable long-run company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyze, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “Big data” revolution in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage.

EURHISFIRM is a project funded by the European Commission within the Infrastructure Development Program of Horizon 2020. The first phase of the Infrastructure Development Program lasts for three years. It aims at developing an in-depth design study of the Research Infrastructure. After this phase, Development and Consolidation Phases follow if further applications will be successful. EURHISFIRM brings together eleven research institutions in economics, history, information technologies and data science from seven European countries.

Position to be filled

• Position: Post-doctoral fellow / Research Engineer
• Time commitment: Full-time
• Duration of the contract: up to 18 months, starting as soon a possible
• Supervisors: Bertrand Coüasnon and Aurélie Lemaitre
• Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits
• Location: IRISA – Rennes, France

Missions

The post-doctoral fellow will join a team working on EURHISFIRM workflow. The goal is to extract information from images of financial documents from the 20th century. We mainly focus on two collections: yearbooks, which describes the companies and their administrators, and prices lists, which are newspapers showing the daily stock prices. Due to the large variety of those documents, it requires a flexible and easy-to-adapt document recognition system. It is based on a modelling of knowledge not only at the page level but also at the collection level in interaction with experts of the historical sources.

A first system has been designed, using DMOS-PI method. It uses a grammatical language, EPF (Enhanced Position Formalism), to describe a general page layout, with perceptive vision mechanisms, and an iterative analysis. The system also combines structural method with Deep Learning. For new collections, an adapted description of the document layout must be developed. This has to be done on a large range of structure levels: from very structured pages like table structures from stock exchange lists, up to a paragraph-oriented structures from yearbooks.

Some first experiments have been led on the recognition of “price lists” documents, on a specific French corpus. The objective of the work will be to generalize this system to other collections of price lists, from other countries. This requires to identify which are the common parts of price lists from each stock exchanges and countries, and how to make the system able to be adapted to a new collection in an easy way.

Applicant Requirements

• PhD, Master degree or Engineering degree in computer science
• Experience in document recognition, statistical analysis or deep learning.
• Fluent English
• Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have.

Candidates should contact via email: Bertrand Coüasnon (bertrand.couasnon@irisa.fr) and Aurélie Lemaitre (aurelie.lemaitre@irisa.fr).

Bertrand Coüasnon, Director, Media and Interactions Department (IRISA)

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 )

Contributions and Subscriptions

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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