IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2023 02

February, 2023

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Table of Contents

• Message from the Editor
• Dates and Deadlines
  • Deadlines
  • Upcoming Conferences and Events
• ICDAR 2023
  • Workshops of ICDAR 2023
  • ICDAR 2023 Competitions *(repost)*
  • DUDE Competition
• SSDA 2023 and SSDA 2024
  • Call for SSDA 2023 and SSDA 2024 Proposals

* Job Offers  

• • 2x Post-doctoral positions at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona
• Datasets
  • TC11 Datasets Repository
    • Where to share datasets

Message from the Editor

Dear TC11 members,

Now is the time to take part in ICDAR workshops and competitions!. Take a look at the many interesting workshops that will be held in conjunction with ICDAR (ICDAR 2023 Workshops). This issue lists the different workshops along with their websites.
As for the various ICDAR competitions, researchers from academia or industry are encouraged to participate. Find those interesting competitions at ICDAR 2023 Competitions

In this issue you will find a call for proposals for organizing the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA) for 2023 or 2024. You will also find new job offers.

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 Twitter (iapr_tc11): https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11

Dates and Deadlines

Deadlines

2023

• March 26 – April 2 ICDAR conference paper rebuttal period ICDAR 2023 dates
• March 31 Proposals due for organizing SSDA 2023 - Organization guidelines

Upcoming Conferences and Events

2023 and Later

• ICDAR 2023. San José, USA (August 21-26, 2023)
• ICDAR 2024. Athens, Greece (September, 2024)

ICDAR 2023

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ICDAR 2023-related calls:

Workshops of ICDAR 2023

A number of interesting workshops will be held in conjunction with ICDAR 2023. The workshops are listed below along with links to their websites. Some of the workshops have already announced the paper submission deadlines.

IWCDF
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on International Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (4th edition) (https://warwick.ac.uk/siplab/IWCDF2023/):
The Fourth International Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (IWCDF 2023) aims at presenting the most recent theoretical and practical advances related to digital document forgery while fostering discussions between academy and industry.

IWCP
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Computational Paleography (2nd edition) (https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/iwcp2023.html):
The goal of this workshop is to bridge the gap between the different research fields analyzing handwritten scripts in ancient artifacts. It is primarily targeted at computer scientists, natural scientists, and humanists involved in the study of ancient writing systems and their materials, but it is not limited to these groups. By promoting discussion among these three communities, the workshop aims to encourage future interdisciplinary collaborations that will address current research questions about ancient manuscripts.

CBDAR
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (https://dll.seecs.nust.edu.pk/cbdar2023):
The ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2023) will be the successor of the previous nine CBDAR workshops. The CBDAR series has a special focus on the analysis of camera captured documents and text. CBDAR is a forum for presenting up-to-date research, sharing experiences, and fomenting discussions on future directions in camera based document analysis.

GREC
ICDAR 2023 International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (15th edition) (https://grec2023.univ-lr.fr/)
GREC 2023 will 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. Graphics Recognition is a subfield of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, comics, musical scores, sketches, maps, architectural plans, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc.

ADAPDA
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Automatically Domain-Adapted and Personalized Document Analysis (ADAPDA) (https://sites.google.com/view/adapdaicdar23)
This workshop aims at gathering expertise and novel ideas for personalized Document Analysis tasks (training and adaptation strategies of writer, language, and visual-specific models, new benchmarks, and data collection strategies), both on-line and off-line, with attention to privacy-preserving solutions.

HIP
ICDAR 2023 International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (7th edition) (HIP’23) (https://blog.sbb.berlin/hip2023/)
The 7th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP’23) will bring together researchers from various fields working on document image acquisition, restoration, analysis, indexing, and retrieval to make these documents accessible in digital libraries. It is the seventh satellite workshop of ICDAR dedicated to this topic, following HIP’11 in Beijing, HIP’13 in Washington, HIP’15 in Nancy, HIP’17 in Kyoto and HIP’19 in Sydney and HIP’21 in Lausanne (hybrid) that were a significant success with strong participation. HIP aims to provide the researchers with a forum that is complementary and synergetic to the main sessions at ICDAR on document analysis and recognition.

VINALDO
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Machine vision and NLP for Document Analysis (1st edition) (VINALDO) (https://sites.google.com/view/vinaldo-workshop-icdar-2023/home)
The first edition of the machine VIsion and NAtural Language processing for DOcument analysis (VINALDO) workshop comes as an extension of the GLESDO workshop, where we encourage the description of novel problems or applications for document analysis in the area of information retrieval that has emerged in recent years. We also encourage works that include NLP tools for extracted text, such as language models and Transforms. Finally, we also encourage works that develop new scanned document datasets for novel applications.

WML
ICDAR 2023 International Workshop on Machine Learning (4th edition) (WML) (https://www.isical.ac.in/~cvpr/ICDARWML23/)
Since 2010, the year of initiation of the annual Imagenet Competition where research teams submit programs that classify and detect objects, machine learning has gained significant popularity. In the present age, Machine learning, in particular deep learning, is incredibly powerful to make predictions based on large amounts of available data. There are many applications of machine learning in Computer vision, pattern recognition including Document analysis, Medical image analysis etc. In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and engagement between document analysis community and other research communities like computer vision and images analysis etc. here we plan to organize this workshop of Machine learning.

ScaleDoc
ICDAR 2023 Workshop on Scaling-up document Image understanding (http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/scaldoc2023/)
Document Analysis has long suffered from both a fragmented landscape of task-specific datasets and a strong focus on narrow-focused information extraction and document conversion tasks. The Scaling-up document Image understanding workshop aims to open the discussion on possible ways for the community to align data preparation efforts and define large-scale (grand) challenges that drive progress in the field.. This is meant to be one of a series of such events to be organized on our scientific forums in the near future. The aspiration is to set the seed for an initiative to create our own community’s document-oriented “ImageNet”, over which multiple long-term grand challenges can be defined.

ICDAR 2023 Competitions (repost)

ICDAR 2023 competitions are now up and running. Find those interesting competitions at ICDAR 2023 Competitions.

Researchers from academia or industry are encouraged to participate. As usual, each competition has its own website, where one may download the datasets, submission guidelines etc. For any questions, please contact the respective organizers of the competition in which you are interested.

DUDE Competition

ICDAR 2023 Competition on Document UnderstanDing of Everything (DUDE) proposes a new dataset for benchmarking Document Understanding systems under real-world settings that have been previously overlooked. In contrast to previous datasets, we extensively source multi-domain, multi-purpose, and multi-page documents of various types, origins, and dates.
Importantly, we bridge the yet unaddressed gap between Document Layout Analysis and Question Answering paradigms by introducing complex layout-navigating questions and unique problems that often demand advanced information processing or multi-step reasoning. Finally, the multi-phased evaluation protocol also assesses the few-shot capabilities of models by testing their generalization power to previously unseen questions and domains, a condition essential to business use cases prevailing in the field.

The registration has been open since December 2022, and the training/validation sets are available on the competition website. This is the competition schedule for the coming deadlines.

Important Dates

March   1, 2023        Evaluation phase 2 open
March  15, 2023        Task 1 submission deadline
April   1, 2023        Evaluation phase 2 deadline

All dates are 23:59 AoE and subject to change.

SSDA 2023 and SSDA 2024

Find below a call for proposals for organizing the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA). The call can be answered for organizing either the 2023 edition or 2024 edition. The deadline for SSDA 2023 has been extended till March 31, 2023. Proposals for organizing the summer school in 2024 are also welcome.

Call for SSDA 2023 and SSDA 2024 Proposals

SSDA 2023/2024 call for proposals: IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis

Important Dates

March 31, 2023    proposal submission deadline for SSDA 2023
TBD               proposal submission deadline for SSDA 2024

Submit Proposals via email to:

• Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative), foteini.liwicki@ltu.se
  
• KC Santosh (TC10 Representative), Santosh.KC@usd.edu

Part of the mission of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) TC11 and TC10 is to promote high quality educational activities related to Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. Responding to this need, TC10 and TC11 have established a series of summer schools. After the successful organization of summer schools in Jaipur, India, La Rochelle, France, Islamabad, Pakistan, and Luleå, Sweden, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the fifth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2023.

The “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” is intended to become the primary educational activity of IAPR TC11 (Reading Systems) and TC10 (Graphics Recognition). The School is meant to be a training activity where participants are exposed to the latest trends and techniques of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition.

The aim of the School is to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in selected topics of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The School should aim to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and PhD students in the field.

Individuals and groups who are interested in Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting the 2023 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School.

In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarize themselves with the guidelines for organizing the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site:
http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Guidelines_for_Organising_and_Bidding_to_Host_the_TC10_/_TC11_Summer_School

The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures for organizing the School. Especially, this means that organizers will apply for IAPR support and that the event will use the series title “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” with an optional sub-title denoting a special focus of the respective event.

Please consider submitting a proposal for this increasingly important event for the TC10/TC11 community. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact the TC11 and TC10 SSDA representatives: Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative) and KC Santosh (TC10 Representative).

Previous events: As a reference, the 2021 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Luleå, Sweden with the theme Digital Transformation in a Changing World.

Job Offers

Find below a post about 2 open postdoc positions at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), Barcelona. The positions are focused on computer vision and federated learning and differential privacy.

2x Post-doctoral positions at the Computer Vision Center, Barcelona

We are seeking two postdoctoral researchers to join the Vision, Language and Reading group at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), in Barcelona, Spain, focused on (1) COMPUTER VISION and (2) FEDERATED LEARNING AND DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY.

The positions are available for a minimum of 2 years, and are linked to the “European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI” (ELSA), a European Project funded by Horizon Europe and backed by the ELLIS network of excellence. The project covers research topics that include robustness, privacy and human agency and will develop use cases in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, health and document intelligence. The candidate researchers will focus on privacy aware methods for document understanding.

CANDIDATE ’S PROFILE
The candidate should possess a PhD in machine learning or computer vision and have a strong publication record. We are looking for candidates who have publications in top conferences like CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDAR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR.

The candidate should have a strong background in machine learning and computer vision. Experience on document image analysis and/or visual question answering would be positive. The applicants are expected to be fluent in both oral and written communication in English. They should work well in a team while demonstrating initiative and independence. The candidate is expected to co-supervise PhD students.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the design and development of AI solutions for document understanding, employing privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures set up by the ELSA project.

THE COMPUTER VISION CENTER
The selected candidate will work in the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), Barcelona, a research institute comprising more than 130 researchers and support staff, dedicated to computer vision research and knowledge transfer. With a strong international projection and links to the industry, the Computer Vision Centre offers an exciting environment for scientific career development. The Computer Vision Centre has a plan for expansion of its permanent research staff base and has received the “HR Excellence in Research” award as a provider and supporter of a stimulating and favourable working environment.

The direct responsible for these posts will Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, leading the Vision, Language and Reading research group at the CVC.

Barcelona is a vibrant city and an important Artificial Intelligence hub. The high quality of life is combined with an open and international looking character of the city. Barcelona is very well connected by air, sea and ground transportation. The region of Catalonia boosts its own AI strategy, in which the CVC is a key player.

RESEARCH CONTACT
If you are interested in the position, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas for more information and applications (dimos@cvc.uab.es)

APPLICATION PROCESS
Apply by filling in the online form at:
Computer Vision: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/
FL and DP: http://www.cvc.uab.es/blog/2023/01/11/postdoc-position-in-computer-vision/

MORE INFO
ELSA project: https://elsa-ai.eu/
Computer Vision Center: http://www.cvc.uab.es/
Vision, Language and Reading group: https://www.vlr.ai/

Datasets

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@lrde.epita.fr )

Contributions and Subscriptions

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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