IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2020 11
November, 2020
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- Message from the Editor
- Dates and Deadlines
- Deadlines
- Upcoming Conferences and Events
- Conferences
- ICDAR 2021: Call for Tutorials
- ICDAR 2021: On-Line Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2021)
- Datasets
- TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)*
- Careers
- Available PhD Position, Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (CS@RIT)
Today is the last day for submitting an article for the ICDAR-IJDAR journal track. Detailed instructions on how to prepare and submit regular papers for ICDAR 2021 will be published soon on the conference website (submission deadline: February 8th). In the meantime, please consider submitting a proposal for holding a tutorial at the conference until December 6th.
Further in this newsletter you will find a call for participation in the ICDAR 2021 On-Line Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2021) and an open PhD position in the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (DPRL) at RIT.
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
Deadlines
2020
- December 6: Tutorial proposals ICDAR 2021
2021
- February 8: Paper submission ICDAR 2021
Upcoming Conferences and Events
2021 and Later
- ICPR 2020. Virtual (January 10-15, 2021)
- ICDAR 2021. Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10, 2021)
- ICFHR 2022. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022)
ICDAR 2021: Call for Tutorials
Important Dates
Dec 6, 2020 Proposal Due Dec 23, 2020 Acceptance Notification Sep 5-7, 2021 Dates of Tutorials
The ICDAR 2021 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials that will be held on September 5-7th (the correct final date will be communicated as soon as possible), before the main conference begins.
ICDAR 2021 Tutorials should serve one or more of the following objectives:
- Introduce students and newcomers to major topics of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) research.
- Provide instructions on established practices and methodologies.
- Introduce expert non-specialists to a DAR subarea. Survey a mature area of DAR research and/or practice.
- Motivate and explain a DAR topic of emerging importance.
- Overview DAR systems for industrial solutions (suggestion for researchers in industry).
- Introduce some recent innovative techniques for DAR research and software quality, such as open-source libraries, high-level API, technical frameworks for expert developments, etc. (suggestion for expert programmers).
An ICDAR tutorial should aim to give a comprehensive overview of a specific topic related to DAR. A good tutorial should be educational rather than just a cursory survey of techniques. The topic should be of sufficient relevance and importance to attract significant interest from the ICDAR community. Typical tutorial audiences consist of PhD students studying computer vision, image processing or pattern recognition, but also include researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry.
In order to facilitate innovative collaboration and interaction between researchers in academia and industry, the Tutorial Chairs strongly encourage proposals for industrial tutorials, in which researchers in companies describe DAR systems and overview industrial solutions to document analysis problems in real use-case industrial scenarios.
Proposals should be up to 4 pages in length, and should contain the following information:
- Title of the tutorial.
- Scope and motivation. A brief description of the tutorial, suitable for inclusion in the conference registration brochure.
- Preference for the duration (full day or half day). Due to agenda constraints, half day tutorials are recommended. If a full day is needed, provide a brief justification.
- A detailed outline of the tutorial. Course description with list of topics to be covered, along with a brief outline.
- Relevance for ICDAR. A description of why the tutorial topic would be of interest to a substantial part of the ICDAR audience.
- Expected target audience in terms of composition and estimated number of attendees. Prerequisite knowledge of the ICDAR audience for attending the tutorial.
- Short CV of organizers. A brief CV of the presenter(s), including name, postal address, phone number, e-mail address, web page, background in the tutorial area (projects, relevant publications or tutorial-level articles on the subject), evidence of teaching experience.
- The name and e-mail address of the corresponding presenter. The corresponding presenter should be available for e-mail correspondence during the evaluation process, in the case clarifications and discussions on the scope and content of the proposal are needed.
Evaluation
The evaluation of the proposal will take into account its general interest for ICDAR attendees, the quality of the proposal (e.g., a tutorial that simply lists a set of concepts without any apparent rationale behind them will not be approved) as well as the expertise and skills of the presenters. We emphasize that the primary criteria for evaluation will be whether a proposal is interesting, well-structured, and motivated in relation to Document Analysis and Recognition, rather than the perceived experience/standing of the proposer.
Last but not least, the tutorial should attract a meaningful audience, cover hot topics and incorporate new knowledge to the community. Those submitting a proposal should keep in mind that tutorials are intended to provide an overview of the field; they should present reasonably well established information in a balanced way. Tutorials should not be used to advocate a single avenue of research, nor should they promote a product.
Notes:
- Tutorial slides must be provided to us for inclusion on the conference website and also on the TC-10 and TC-11 websites, as educational material.
- The ICDAR main conference organizers will handle the tutorial registration and provide the space, coffee breaks and other facilities required to organize tutorials (e.g. a room, a projector and a screen).
Submission Guidelines & Inquiries
All proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the Tutorial Chairs:
- Veronique Eglin (veronique.eglin@insa-lyon.fr)
- Alicia Fornés (afornes@cvc.uab.es)
Feedback, comments and/or suggestions would be provided within two weeks of receiving the proposal. Final acceptance (or rejection) would be decided by December 23, 2020.
For any inquiries you may have, please contact us via the above emails.
ICDAR 2021: On-Line Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2021)
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the ICDAR 2021 On-Line Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2021) to be organized in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 5-10 September 2021, Lausanne (Switzerland).
Organizers
Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez and Javier Ortega-Garcia
Links
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/SVC2021/home
CodaLab: https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27295
Overview
The goal of the SVC 2021 competition is to evaluate the limits of on-line signature verification systems using large-scale public databases and popular scenarios (office/mobile), and the stylus/finger as writing input. On-line signature verification technology is evolving fast in the last years due to several factors such as: i) the evolution in the acquisition technology going from the original Wacom devices specifically designed to acquire handwriting and signature in office-like scenarios through a pen stylus to the current touch screens of mobile scenarios in which signatures can be captured anywhere using our own personal smartphone through the finger, and ii) the extended usage of deep learning technology in many different areas, overcoming traditional handcrafted approaches and even human performance.
Therefore, in this competition the goal is to carry out a benchmark evaluation of the latest on-line signature verification technology using large-scale public databases such as DeepSignDB and both traditional office-like scenarios (pen stylus), but also the challenging mobile scenarios with signatures performed using the finger over a touch screen. The SVC 2021 competition will provide a complete panorama of the state of the art in the on-line signature verification field under realistic scenarios.
Tasks
Task 1: Analysis of office scenarios using the stylus as input.
Task 2: Analysis of mobile scenarios using the finger as input.
Task 3: Analysis of both office and mobile scenarios simultaneously.
In addition, both random and skilled forgeries will be considered in each Task.
Awards
If enough interest is received from the community (more than 5 different participants beating the baseline algorithms), then the winner of the SVC 2021 competition will receive a monetary award of 300 EUR (as an Amazon gift card). In addition, a selection of the best on-line signature verification systems will have the opportunity to take part as co-authors in a joint paper describing the SVC 2021 competition results.
Registration
The platform used in the SVC 2021 competition is CodaLab. Participants need to register to take part in the competition. Please, follow the instructions:
- Fill out this form including your information.
- Sing up in CodaLab using the same email introduced in step 1).
- Join in CodaLab to the ICDAR 2021 On-Line Signature Verification Competition. Just click in the Participate tab for the registration.
Anonymous participants: participants are allowed to decide at the end of the competition whether they would like to include their names and affiliations in the competition report or not. Nevertheless, the organizers might include the results and some information about the systems but always completely anonymized.
Schedule
Tentative dates:
15th November 2020: Beginning of the competition. Registration starts and development data release.
8th March 2021: Registration deadline.
15th March 2021: Final Evaluation data release (without ground-truth).
17th March 2021: End of the competition. Results Submission.
24th March 2021: Notification of the results. Ground-truth release.
25th March 2021: Selection and notification of the best systems to take part in a joint paper.
Best regards,
The organizers:
Ruben Tolosana ruben.tolosana@uam.es
Ruben Vera-Rodriguez ruben.vera@uam.es
Aythami Morales aythami.morales@uam.es
Julian Fierrez julian.fierrez@uam.es
Javier Ortega-Garcia javier.ortega@uam.es
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 )
Available PhD Position, Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (CS@RIT)
Department of Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Start Date: Fall 2021
We are looking for a qualified candidate to fill a grant-funded PhD position in the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab at RIT starting in Fall 2021. This position will be part of the recently created Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI) funded by the US government.
MMLI is led by a number of world-renown computer scientists and chemists seeking to accelerate chemical discovery (e.g., in service of creating improved materials for solar cells), along with related educational and outreach efforts intended to democratize the chemical discovery process. The project is centered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with participation from researchers at Penn State and RIT.
The focus of this PhD is the recognition/extraction, indexing, and search of chemical diagrams, multimodal search (text + diagrams), and creating chemical knowledge graphs extracted from the chemical literature and other sources. The aim with this work is to advance the state-of-the-art for diagrammatic recognition and search, as the associated development of new AI-based techniques for chemical discovery. In this PhD role, the student will have be expected to collaborate effectively in an interdisciplinary team comprised of computer scientists, chemists, and engineers.
Questions about this position should be sent to the dprl lab director, Richard Zanibbi (rxzvcs@rit.edu). Please share this with others that may be interested.
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