IAPR TC11 Newsletter 2023 10
October, 2023
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- Message from the Editor
- Dates and Deadlines
- Deadlines
- Upcoming Conferences and Events
- Open Call for Organizing DAR Events
- Journal-first Track for ICDAR 2024: Call for Papers and Reviewers
- Call for Tutorials for ICDAR 2024
- Call for Papers (CPF) for ICPRAI 2024
- Call for Hosting Proposals: SSDA 2025
- PhD Positions (Fall 2024) in Information Retrieval / Extraction at RIT, USA
- HIP’23 @ ICDAR2023 Report
- ScalDoc’23 @ ICDAR2023 Report
- Datasets
- TC11 Datasets Repository
- Where to share datasets
- TC11 Datasets Repository
Dear TC11 members,
In this thick issue you will find several calls, starting with the open call for organizing our major DAR events that will be held in the coming years: tutorials for ICDAR 2024, SSDA 2025 (note that other calls have already been published in the previous September issue).
We also have two calls for papers, namely for the Journal-First track for ICDAR 2024 with a very near deadline, and a CFP for ICPRAI 2024.
There are interesting openings for PhD positions in Information Retrieval / Extraction at RIT, USA.
Finally, we continue to share with you reports on our recent successful events. In this issue you will find a report on the HIP workshop of ICDAR 2023, and a more detailed report on the ScalDoc 2023 workshop. Both contain information about the future of those workshops.
Please make sure you check the many deadlines and events of 2023 and 2024.
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
Deadlines
2023
- November 14 Paper submission for Journal-First track of ICDAR 2024 - firm deadline
- November 30 Tutorial proposal submission for ICDAR 2024
- November 30 Proposal submission for hosting DAS 2024
- December 15 Paper submission for ICPRAI 2024
- December 15 Nominations due for the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award
2024
- January 31 proposal submission for hosting ICDAR 2027
- April 5 Proposal submission for hosting SSDA 2025
Upcoming Conferences and Events
2023 and 2024
- ACPR 2023. Kitakyushu, Japan (November 5-8, 2023)
- ICPRAI 2024. Jeju Island, South Korea (June 18-21, 2024)
- ICDAR 2024. Athens, Greece (August 30 - September 4, 2024)
- ICPR 2024. Kolkata, India (December 01-05, 2024)
The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference.
In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events:
- ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in 2027)
- DAS: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in 2024)
- GREC: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
- SSDA: Summer School on Document Analysis (biannually in odd years; next possibility in 2025)
You may find the details of each specific call in the previous or future issues of this newsletter or in the respective websites of each event.
Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to jean-christophe.burie@univ-lr.fr and andreas.fischer@unifr.ch, in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal.
Jean-Christophe Burie (Chair, TC10)
Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)
As announced in the main Call for Papers (CFP) of ICDAR 2024, ICDAR will have a Journal-First track. The submission site in Springer is now open at:
https://www.springer.com/journal/10032/updates/26200090
Important Dates
Submissions Due: November 14, 2023 (firm deadline)
Note that the deadline has been moved to 14 November 2023 because of the delay in opening this site. Please check the above website for further submission details and important dates.
Reviewers
We would like to encourage anyone interested in doing reviews for this interesting journal track to contact Prof. Elisa Barney elisa.barney@ltu.se.
The ICDAR 2024 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials that will be held on August 30th to September 4th (the correct final date will be communicated as soon as possible), before the main conference begins.
Important Dates
Proposals Due: Nov. 30, 2023 Acceptance Notification: Dec. 23, 2023 Dates of Tutorials: Aug. 30 - Sep. 4, 2024
ICDAR 2024 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: - Alicia Fornes afornes@cvc.uab.es - Vincent Christlein vincent.christlein@fau.de
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, 2023.
Inquiries should be sent to tutorials-chairs@icdar2024.net or the above emails.
We are pleased to host the 4th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (ICPRAI2024), taking place on Jeju Island, South Korea from June 18 to 21, 2024. The conference aims to bring together researchers, students, and practitioners of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to encourage overview, in-depth talks, and discussions on the latest research and state of the art.
Important Dates and Deadlines
Regular Paper Submission: December 15, 2023 Work-in-progress Paper Submission: February 1, 2023 Regular Paper Notification to Authors: March 8, 2024 Work-in-progress Paper Notification to Authors: March 15, 2024 All Papers Camera-ready Submission: April 14, 2024 Conference Dates: June 18-21, 2024
Our main topics of interest are organized in four areas and include - but are not limited to - the following: * Topic Area 1 Pattern Recognition:
Data Clustering, Domain Adaptation and Generalization, Information Retrieval, Feature Extraction/Selection and Evaluation, Statistical Pattern Recognition, Structural Pattern Recognition, Time Series Processing
- Topic Area 2 Computer Vision: Behavior Recognition, Depth Processing and 3D Data, Face and Facial Expression Recognition, Human Pose Estimation, Image Fusion, Image Processing/Analysis, Multimodal Models (Vision + Language), Object Detection and Recognition, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Video Analysis
- Topic Area 3 Artificial Intelligence: Causal Inference, Continual Learning, Expert Systems, GANs and Diffusion Models, Generative AI, Graph Neural Networks, Interpretability and Explainable AI, Knowledge Representation and Representation Learning, Machine/Deep Learning, Optimization, Reinforcement Learning, Semantic Analysis, Uncertainty Prediction, Zero- and Few-Shot Learning
- Topic Area 4 Applications: Autonomous Vehicles, Biometrics, Brain-Computer/Machine Interface, Brain-Inspired Computing, Document Analysis and Recognition, Human-Computer Interaction, Medical Data Processing, Natural Language Processing, Neural Information Processing, Odometry, Robotics, Social Computing, Unmanned Systems
Paper Submissions and Guidelines
Regular papers will follow the LNCS Springer template and are restricted to 14 pages. They must present original research and represent a significant contribution to the field. Accepted regular papers will be presented in either oral or poster sessions. All accepted regular papers will be published in the LNCS proceedings by Springer. In addition, selected best papers will be eligible for consideration of several best paper awards.
Work-in-progress papers will use the same template and are restricted to 8 pages. These papers are meant to showcase new results and current work for discussion at the conference.
Accepted work-in-progress papers will be presented as posters in a separate session and will be published in the proceedings by Springer.
All papers will be peer-reviewed single-blind. The submission site opens at a later time - please check back the conference website at www.icprai2024.org.
Contact: icprai2024@gmail.com
This is a call for proposals for hosting the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA) 2025.
Important Dates
Proposal Submission Deadline: April 5, 2024
Submit Proposals via email to: * Foteini Simistira Liwicki (TC11 Representative), foteini.liwicki@ltu.se * Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative), momina.moetesum@seecs.edu.pk
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 India, France, Pakistan, Sweden, and Switzerland, we are now soliciting proposals for the organization of the sixth “IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis” (SSDA) in 2025.
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 2025 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia, Europe, and the Sub-continent, organizing teams from the Americas and Africa 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 or click here.
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 Momina Moetesum (TC10 Representative).
Previous events
As a reference, the 2023 Summer School on Document Analysis was held in Fribourg, Switzerland (URL: https://ssda2023.isc.heia-fr.ch/)
PhD Positions Available (Fall 2024)
Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (dprl), RIT, USA
Area: Graphics-Oriented and Multi-Modal Information Retrieval and Information Extraction (i.e., Document Recognition)
Currently we are looking to recruit 2 PhD students to start their PhD as members of the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in the CS Department of RIT in Fall 2024. The focus of our work is on recognizing and retrieving information in document, images, and videos, with an emphasis on graphical notations (e.g., math and chemistry).
An overview of some projects from the lab may be found online here. Former PhD students from the dprl work in a variety of industrial research positions (e.g., at Apple in the bay area) and as professors at US universities (e.g., at DePaul University in Chicago, and the University of Southern Maine).
Information for Applicants:
- All applicants should carefully review the dprl lab pages at: https://www.cs.rit.edu/~dprl/index.html. Have a look at the demonstrations, papers, dissertations, and theses published out of the lab.
- PhD applicants must hold or soon be completing a BSc or MSc in Computer Science (with foundations in theory, algorithms, and implementation).
- To apply, send your CV/resume along with a brief research proposal (1-2 pages) that includes three sections detailing:
- a specific research question,
- how this is related to previous work completed in the dprl, and
- a short sketch of how you would go about addressing the question
- If your background and materials are a fit for the lab, I will email to set up two interviews over Zoom: the first for discussion, and the second is a technical interview.
If you wish to apply or have any questions about the available positions, please do not hesitate to email me at rxzvcs@rit.edu. If you think you may be interested, please contact me soon, the deadline for formal applications to the program is in early-to-mid January of 2024.
We are happy to report that the 7th edition of the International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP’23) was held alongside ICDAR 2023 conference on August 25-26, 2023 in San José, California, USA. For details, please see the workshop website and program at https://blog.sbb.berlin/hip2023/.
The HIP’23 workshop was successful in attracting a total of 33 submissions (incl. 1 withdrawal) from a total of 127 authors representing 19 different countries, of which 18 submissions were finally accepted (acceptance rate: 56%) for oral presentation following a single-blind peer review process by 47 Program Committee Members from 20 countries.
The resulting HIP’23 program was split into four sessions: HTR and Multi-Modal Methods, Classics, Segmentation & Layout Analysis, and Language Technologies & Classification. As usual, the HIP’23 proceedings were published in the ACM Digital Library before the workshop. HIP received endorsement from the IAPR and support from FamilySearch and the EPFL.
The traditional HIP excursion was a visit to the very interesting Computer History Museum. Many of the HIP participants and additional friends of HIP joined this visit.
With the continued strong interest in HIP and historical documents, discussions were held between the HIP organizers and the IAPR TC11 leadership as well as with HIP participants about future opportunities. It was decided that HIP will become an official stand-alone TC11 event, decoupled from ICDAR workshop calls, but still co-located with ICDAR. With ICDAR becoming an annual event, the initial idea is to keep organizing HIP in the odd ICDAR years but perhaps having a low-key event also in the even years (several participants expressed their desire for this).
In another change, as ACM (which published all HIP proceedings so far) moved to mandatory Open Access proceedings which will result in a significant publication charge for many authors, HIP will publish its future proceedings with Springer. This will also allow free access to the proceedings by members of IAPR societies.
The next steps will see the formation of a HIP steering committee and planning of the format of the even-year smaller-scale event at ICDAR 2024. If you too would like to contribute to future editions of HIP in any capacity, please get in touch with the current organizers through hip23@primaresearch.org.
We look forward to future editions of HIP and the continued engagement with its wonderful community!
HIP’23 organizers:
Clemens Neudecker, Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Christian Clausner, Maud Ehrmann, Kai Labusch and Randy Wilson.
The workshop on Scaling Up Image Document Understanding was held at the Adobe World Headquarters in San Jose, California on August 24th, 2023.
The workshop was aimed at opening the discussion on possible ways to widen our community using data preparation efforts and defining the 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 Deep Document Workshop at ICFHR 2022 was our first successful event in this series. The aspiration was to set the seed for an initiative to create our own community’s document-oriented “ImageNet”, over which multiple long-term challenges can be defined.
While most of the participants joined the workshop physically at San Jose, a couple of participants, who could not travel due to several reasons,attended online. A total of 60 participants, including researchers from academia and industry, from various countries attended the event.
The activities of the workshop included two very informative keynote sessions, an innovative pitch session and an exciting panel discussion. The invited talks were 45 minutes long.
Keynotes:
- Keynote 1: “What are grand challenges in DAR? Do we already know?”, By: Yasuhisa Fujii (Google Research, Tokyo) - Keynote 2: “Beyond OCR: Non-Textual opportunities and challenges at the Hathitrust Research Center”, By: J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Pitch session:
The session was moderated by Anand Mishra of IIT Jodhpur. The participants were asked to give a 2 min presentation on datasets, challenges and competitions in the document research community. The topics were shared with the participants prior to the workshop.
The pitch participants were Anna Scius-Bertrand (HES-SO), Christopher Kermorvant (Founder-TEKLIA), Lukasz Borchmann (Snowflake), Shangbang Long (Google), Ravi Kiran S (IIIT Hyderabad), Shubhi Asthana (IBM), Vincent Christlein (University Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Stepan Simsa (Rossum.ai).
Panel Discussion:
The interactive panel discussion led by Andreas Fischer consisted of Mickael Coustaty (La Rochelle Universite), Joseph Chazalon (LRDE, EPITA), Anand Mishra (IIT Jodhpur), Stephen Downie (University of Illinois), Yasuhisa Fujii (Google Research) as panel members.
The main topic of discussion was on the existing or future challenges and datasets of DAR that will help us to scale up DAR research. The three representatives of TC10/11 in the panel were trying to understand how they can help in dataset preparations. The panel discussed on why document analysis and recognitions exist, how it evolved over the years from simple text recognition to more complex recognitions, more content, as well as topics like HCI, Interactive documents, better tools for the end users, more visibility for datasets, Joining multiple isolated datasets into a single one, interaction with digital library communities etc.
The young people who attended the ScalDoc workshop were so motivated that a Slack channel was created soon after to gather academic and industrial researchers willing to collaborate on the creation of a “dataset of datasets” and is mentioned in the August TC11 newsletter.
We are deeply thankful to the keynote speakers, panel members, pitch speakers, organizers, all the workshop participants and all the members of the ICDAR program committee whose collaboration has been fundamental for the success of this workshop.
Organizers
- Anand Mishra, IIT Jodhpur - Seiichi Uchida, Kyushu University - Andreas Fischer, HES-SO Switzerland - C V Jawahar, IIIT Hyderabad - Dimosthenis Karatzas, CVC, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
TC11 Datasets Repository
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 )
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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