IAPR-TC11: Newsletter 2018/2

February, 2018

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Table of Contents

• Message from the Editor
• Dates and Deadlines
  • Deadlines
  • Upcoming Conference Dates
• ICFHR
  • ICFHR 2018: Call for Papers (!! Deadline Extended)
  • ICFHR 2018 Workshops: Call for Proposals (!! Deadline Extended)
    • Full Workshops
    • Birds of a Feather Workshops
  • ICFHR 2018 Tutorials: Call for Proposals
  • ICFHR 2018 Competitions: Call for Participation
• DAS 2018: Discussion Groups
• ICPR: Competitions
  • ICPR 2018: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification Competition (repost)
  • ICPR 2018 Contest on Fraud Detection: Call for Participation
• IJDAR
  • New Issue: IJDAR Dec. 2017 (Vol. 20, Issue 4)
  • IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)
• Careers
  • Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR List) - repost
• Datasets

Message from the Editor

Correction/Updates (March 1, 2018)

• ICFHR Extended Deadlines: Updated paper and workshop proposal deadlines provided (March 16/23, and March 15, respectively)
• Missing DAS discussion group post added

Greetings - I hope that you have all been enjoying the Winter Olympics these past couple weeks. For some of us, maybe even in person at PyeongChang!

Deadlines for the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) are now fast approaching. Paper submission is open; please note that reviewing will be double-blind. A number of competitions are underway that we encourage you to consider participating in. There is also a call for workshops at ICFHR, both as ‘standard’ workshops, as well as less formal ‘birds-of-a-feather’ meetings for discussing topics related to handwriting recognition. A call for tutorials at ICFHR has also been released. Niagara Falls provides a particularly nice environment for thinking, walking and talking: we strongly encourage the community to take advantage of this by submitting workshop and tutorial proposals ASAP.

DAS: A call for participation in discussion groups at DAS 2018 in Vienna has been posted. Attendees at DAS are encouraged to fill out the form provided in the announcement at their earliest convenience, to help the organizers plan these sessions.

ICPR: We have a couple of competitions from ICPR featured, on personality detection in handwriting, and fraud detection in documents. Please see the calls for participation for details.

In closing, I am happy to report that we have received proposals for the TC-10/TC-11 summer school, and we hope to provide an update in the newsletter next month.

Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC-11 community, please consider joining the TC11 mailing list. Follow us on Twitter (iapr_tc11): https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11

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

Dates and Deadlines

Deadlines

2018

• Mar. 15 (!! Extended) ICFHR 2018 Workshop and Tutorial Proposal deadline ( Call for Proposals )
• Mar. 16/23 (!! Extended): ICFHR 2018 abstract/paper submissions (Call for Papers )

Upcoming Conference Dates

2018

• ASAR 2018. London, UK (March 12-14, 2018)
• DAS 2018. Vienna, Austria (24-27 April, 2018)
• ICPRAI 2018. Montreal, Canada (May 14-17, 2018)
• ICFHR 2018. Niagara Falls, USA (August 5-8, 2018)
• ICPR 2018. Beijing, China (August 20-24, 2018)
• DocEng 2018. Halifax, Canada (August 28-31, 2018)

2019 and Later

• ICDAR 2019, Sydney, Australia (September 22-25, 2019)
• ICFHR 2020. Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10, 2020)

ICFHR

ICFHR 2018: Call for Papers (!! Deadline Extended)

The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition
August 5 - 8, 2018 - Niagara Falls, USA
Web page: icfhr2018.org
PDF Version of this Call: ICFHR2018_CFP.pdf

Important Dates

**March 16, 2018**  Paper abstract submission
**March 23, 2018**  Full paper submission
    May 25, 2018    Author notifications
   June 22, 2018    Camera-ready papers due

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

ICFHR 2018 is sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and organized in part by IAPR Technical Committee No. 11 (Reading Systems).

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

• Handwriting Recognition
  

• Cursive Script Recognition
  

• Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition
  

• Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding
  

• Language Models in Handwriting Recognition
  

• Web-Based Applications
  

• Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries
  

• Information Extraction & Retrieval
  

• Document Characterization
  

• Form Processing
  

• Word Spotting
  

• 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, and paper reviews will be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the ICFHR 2018 web site (icfhr2018.org).

Questions about paper submission should be directed to the Program Chairs ( pc@icfhr2018.org ).

Umapada Pal, Christian Viard-Gaudin and Luiz S. Oliveira, ICFHR Program Chairs
( umapada@isical.ac.in, christian.viard-gaudin@univ-nantes.fr, lesoliveira@inf.ufpr.br )

ICFHR 2018 Workshops: Call for Proposals (!! Deadline Extended)

Workshop Chairs: Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés
Online: http://icfhr2018.org/workshops.html

Important Dates

**March 15**  Workshop proposal deadline
**April 2**  Notification to workshop organizers
  April 20   Finalized workshop program (i.e., CFP) 

The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2018) will take place in Niagara Falls New York, USA 5-8 August 2018. For the first time the conference is also welcoming bids for accompanying workshops. The workshops will take place on August 4 at the same venue as the main conference in Niagara Falls New York, USA.

Workshops provide a forum for discussion topics that will not be fully explored during the main conference, and provide opportunities for in-depth discussion of technical and application issues. Workshops are also a good opportunity to share ideas between researchers in industry and academia, and therefore both are welcome to submit workshop proposals. The ICFHR 2018 organizers will collect workshop registrations, provide facilities, and distribute electronic copies of the workshop proceedings.

Two types of workshops are envisioned:

1. Full (mini-conference) workshops
2. Birds of a Feather workshops

Full Workshops

Full workshops would likely include papers, posters or presentations. Full workshops may be half day or full day. We invite proposals for workshops on topics related to handwriting recognition, including domains that apply handwriting recognition such as the digital humanities or forensics. We encourage workshop organizers to submit proposals that are specific and detailed in justifying relevance and viability.

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format by email to workshops@icfhr2018.org. Please prefix the email subject with the string ‘[ICFHR 2018 Workshop]’. Proposals should include the following information:

1. TECHNICAL INFORMATION
   • Workshop title.
   • Topics that will be covered, with descriptions of why they are relevant.
2. ORGANIZERS AND SPEAKERS
   • Organizers’ names, titles and affiliations, with one, potentially two, contact emails of reliably responsive people.
   • Background and experience that makes the proposers well suited for organizing the workshop.
   • Names of invited speakers. For each speaker, please indicate if attendance is tentative or confirmed.
3. LOGISTICS
   • Preference for half-day or full-day event.
   • Estimated numbers of orals, posters, and invited talks, with rough program outline.
   • Expected number of paper submissions.
   • Tentative program committee.
   • Anticipated target audience and expected number of attendees.
   • Special space or equipment requests, if any.
4. WORKSHOP DATES
   • Paper submission deadline.
   • Notification to authors.
   • Camera ready deadline.

Birds of a Feather Workshops

Birds of a Feather workshops provide a forum for discussion of the status and needs for further research within a particular subfield of handwriting recognition, beyond the paper Q&A in a conference session. Participants would optionally submit 500 word abstracts stating ideas for discussion topics, and not recent research results. Participants would not submit full papers and there would be no proceedings.

Birds of a feather workshops are envisioned to be at most a half day and could be as little as two hours centered around coffee/tea or a meal to increase informal discussion.

Meeting topics can be taken from any of the main ICFHR conference CFP topics:

• Handwriting Recognition of a particular family
• Cursive Script Recognition
• Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition
• Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding
• Language Models in Handwriting Recognition
• Web-Based Applications
• Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries
• Information Extraction & Retrieval
• Document Characterization
• Form Processing
• Word Spotting
• Bank-Check Processing
• Historical Document Processing
• Forensic Studies and Security Issues
• Writer Verification and Identification

Proposals should be submitted by email to workshops@icfhr2018.org. Please prefix the email subject with the string [ICFHR 2018 Workshop]. Proposals should include the following information:

1. TECHNICAL INFORMATION
   • Workshop title.
   • Topics that will be covered, with descriptions of why they are relevant.
2. ORGANIZERS AND SPEAKERS
   • Organizers’ names, titles and affiliations, background and experience that makes the proposers well suited for leading the discussion.
3. LOGISTICS
   • Preference for half-day or two-hour event.

For any questions, please contact the workshop chairs at workshops@icfhr2018.org.

Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés, ICFHR Workshop and Tutorial Chairs
( ebarneysmith@boisestate.edu, afornes@cvc.uab.es )

ICFHR 2018 Tutorials: Call for Proposals

Tutorial Chairs: Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés
Online: http://icfhr2018.org/tutorials.html

Important dates

**March 15**  Tutorial proposal deadline
**April 2**   Notification to tutorial organizers

The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2018) will take place in Niagara Falls New York, USA 5-8 August 2018. We are soliciting proposals for tutorials or short courses to be held at ICFHR 2018. Courses and tutorials will take place on August 4, the day before the main conference.

An ICFHR tutorial should provide a comprehensive overview of a specific topic related to handwriting recognition, and the topic should be of sufficient relevance and importance to attract significant interest from the ICFHR community. A good tutorial should be educational rather than just a cursory survey of techniques. Typical tutorial audiences consist of graduate students studying computer vision, image processing, or pattern recognition, but also include researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry.

We invite proposals for both half-day and full-day courses: however, we encourage courses to be half-day unless the topic is expected to attract widespread community attention, or will require the additional time.

Proposals should be submitted by email to tutorials@icfhr2018.org. Please prefix the email subject with the string ‘[ICFHR 2018 Tutorial]’. Proposals should be in PDF format and should include the following information:

• Proposed title;
• Proposers’ names, titles, affiliations, emails, and brief bio sketches;
• Preference for half- or full-day event (the latter requires a brief justification);
• Course description with list of topics to be covered, along with a brief outline and important details;
• Expected target audience, in terms of both composition and estimated number of attendees;
• List of citations and/or URLs to relevant publications and/or products by the organizers, and to other relevant related work;
• Description of and/or links to any planned materials or resources to be distributed to attendees.

For any questions, please contact the tutorial chairs at tutorials@icfhr2018.org.

Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés, ICFHR Workshop and Tutorial Chairs
( ebarneysmith@boisestate.edu, afornes@cvc.uab.es )

ICFHR 2018 Competitions: Call for Participation

Web: http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html
Twitter: [@IAPR_TC11](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/IAPR-TC11:Reading_Systems) @@ICFHR2018 @@ICFHR2018competitions

Important Dates

    1 June 2018:  Full papers describing competitions due 
   29 June 2018:  Accepted camera-ready papers due

ICFHR 2018 is hosting seven competitions in the following areas:

• Handwritten Document Image Binarization Contest
• Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts
• Multi-script Writer Identification
• Vietnamese Online Handwritten Text Recognition using HANDS-VNOnDB
• Competition on Automated Text Recognition on a READ Dataset
• Document Image Analysis Tasks for Southeast Asian Palm Leaf Manuscripts
• Thai Student Signature and Name Components Recognition and Verification

Please visit the competitions web page, and contact the organizers through the available links. If you have any questions, please contact the Competitions Chairs at competitions@icfhr2018.org.

Harold Mouchère and Nicholas Howe, ICFHR 2018 Competition Chairs
( competitions@icfhr2018.org )

DAS 2018: Discussion Groups

13TH IAPR INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON DOCUMENT ANALYSIS SYSTEMS
24-27 April, Vienna, Austria
https://das2018.cvl.tuwien.ac.at

According to a long-standing tradition at the DAS workshops, we will hold small-group discussions on topics of special interest to attendees. It is a nice opportunity to meet other researchers and discuss on relevant topics for the community. Everyone is welcome to participate in the discussions. Moreover, each group needs a moderator and a scribe. Their roles are:

• The moderator encourages everyone to speak and helps to focus and clarify the discussion.
• The scribe takes written notes of the discussion and summarizes the results in a plenary session.

The moderator and the scribe will co-author a short summary report after the workshop is over, which will be posted to the workshop website and at the TC-11 website (http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/DAS-Discussion:Index). The names of the moderators and scribes will be also listed at the website.

Please fill this form (https://goo.gl/forms/11S842VWuvfIbAAB2) choosing the topics of your interest, and feel free to propose some.

We are looking forward to your participation! Please contact the Discussion Groups coordinators with your suggestions and ideas:

Alicia Fornés (afornes@cvc.uab.es)
Marcus Liwicki (marcus.liwicki@unifr.ch)

ICPR: Competitions

ICPR 2018: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification Competition (repost)

Web: http://chalearnlap.cvc.uab.es/challenge/27/description

Important Dates

Feb. 20: Competition starts
Mar. 20: Release of evaluation data
Apr. 21: Code submission deadline
Apr. 22: Decryption key release
Apr. 24: End of competition
Apr. 27: Deadline for fact sheet submission
Apr. 30: Paper submisssion deadline
May  10: Release of verification results
Aug. 21: Workshop and award ceremony at ICPR

A Competition on Multimedia Information Processing for Personality and Social Networks Analysis is being held as a part of ICPR 2018 by members of IAPR TC-12. One task in particular may be of interest to the TC-11 community:

Task 2 - HWxPI: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification. The corpus used in this task consists of handwritten Spanish essays from undergraduates Mexican students. For each essay two files are available: a manual transcript of the text and a scan image of the original sheet where the subject hand-wrote the essay. The texts of manual transcriptions have tags to mark some handwritten phenomena namely:

• FO (well-written word (misspelling)),
• D (description (drawing)),
• IN (insertion of a letter into a word),
• MD (modification of a word, that is a correction of a word),
• DL (elimination of a word),
• NS (when two words were written together; e.g. Iam instead of I am ) and,
• SB (syllabification).

Each essay is labelled with five values corresponding to 5 personality traits in the Big Five Model of Personality. The traits are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and Openness to experience. The range of the value for each trait is 1 to 7.

For additional details, please contact Dr. Dimos Karatzas, who can direct you to the competition organizers.

Dimosthenis Karatzas, ICPR Contest Co-Chair
(dimos@cvc.uab.es)

ICPR 2018 Contest on Fraud Detection: Call for Participation

Web Page: http://findit.univ-lr.fr

Important Dates

Feb.: Training dataset available
Mar. 30: Registration deadline
Apr. 5: Evaluation dataset is available
Apr. 10: Result submission deadline
Apr. 15: Submitted description of methods
Aug. 20-24: Conference

We are pleased to announce the Fraud Detection Contest in conjunction with ICPR 2018.

In recent decades, the explosion of the volume of digital documents images and development of easy-to-use consumer tools to edit these images has led to a huge increase in the number of corrupted documents. The development of many tools and methods to detect modifications has also increased but their evaluation remains a challenge.

Forensics research is a sensitive topic. Datasets are often private or unlabeled and most related works are evaluated based on undisclosed datasets. This restriction has two major consequences: results cannot be reproduced and no benchmarking can be done between approaches.

This contest was conceived in order to address these drawbacks:

• First, a public image and text dataset of French shopping receipts containing no private information was designed so that it can be disclosed and used with no constraints.
• Second, the contest should finally presents a benchmark on major works developed over many years, both for image and text processing methods.

The contest is open to all researchers and engineers working on detection of forgery within documents, images or texts, coming from different domains (forensics, document analysis, data mining…).

– Tasks –
Task 1: The detection of modified documents. The provided dataset will contain both genuine and modified documents. The first task aims at discovering which ones are forged.
Task 2: The spotting of this or these falsification(s) in the document (many falsifications can occur in one document), with methods applied to the image or text, or both.

Additional Information and Registration may be found on the competition web page:

http://findit.univ-lr.fr

Jean-Marc Ogier, Competition Organizer
( jean-marc.ogier@univ-lr.fr )

IJDAR

New Issue: IJDAR Dec. 2017 (Vol. 20, Issue 4)

Table of Contents

Click on the links to go directly to the Springer Link page for each article.

A restoration method for distorted comics to improve comic contents identification.
Authors:Sang-Hoon Lee, Doyoung Kim, Sagar Jadhav, Sanghoon Lee

Character segmentation and transcription system for historical Japanese books with a self-proliferating character image database. Authors: Chulapong Panichkriangkra, Liang Li, Takaaki Kaneko, Ryo Akama, Kozaburo Hachimura

Recognition of handwritten Lanna Dhamma characters using a set of optimally designed moment features. Authors: Papangkorn Inkeaw, Phasit Charoenkwan, Hui-Ling Huang, Sanparith Marukatat, Shinn-Ying Ho, Jeerayut Chaijaruwanich

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:

• http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjournal.php
• http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjrnlsub.php

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 )

Careers

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR List) - 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 )

Datasets

TC-11 maintains a colletion of datasets that can be found online in the TC-11 Datasets Repository.

If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to share with the research community, please contact the TC-11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below).

Andreas Fischer (TC-11 Dataset Curator)
(andreas.fischer@unifr.ch)

Contributions and Subscriptions

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi ([1]). 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 click on this link: Join the TC-11 Mailing List. To manage your subscription, please visit the mailing list homepage: TC-11 Mailing List Homepage.

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