Title
Document Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition, what is their position today?
Name
Simone MarinaiAbstract
In the early 1990's document image analysis emerged as an important research area in the pattern recognition community. The first ICDAR was organized in 1991 and some milestone books and articles published in this decade helped to shape the field and provide a long-term framework for the research in the area. Since then the research on document image analysis has been important for pattern recognition, providing one clear framework to test new algorithms thanks to the collection of widely adopted benchmark datasets and to the organization of competitions to address open problems. At the same time, IAPR has been important for the document image analysis community and several workshops and conferences have been organized under the IAPR umbrella making this research area one of the most active in the association. Needless to say that two of the most active technical committees within IAPR (TC10 and TC11) are the main organizers of the ICDAR and other conferencesin the field. Despite the large number of papers published every year inproceedings of document image analysis conferences, the research in this area is felt sometimes behind other research fields that are perceived as closer to current industrial trends and more appealing to the general public and to researchers. In this context, several tasks of document image analysisstill have the potentiality to be attractive for a broader research community because of some peculiarities. One example is the complex and variable structure of documents that is an ideal testbed for techniques related to graph-based representations and for other applications of structural pattern recognition.
Short Bio
Simone Marinai received the Master Degree in Electronic Engineering in 1992 and the PhD Degree in Computer Engineering in 1996 both from the University of Florence, Italy. In 1996 he has been visiting researcher at CENPARMI, Concordia University, Montréal. Currently he is Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the Information Engineering department of the University of Florence. His main research interests are in Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition with a special focus on applications in Document Engineering and Document Image Analysis. Prof. Marinai is President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), editor in chief of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) and of the Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (ELCVIA) journal; has been 2nd vice-president of IAPR (2014-16) and Chair of the Conferences and Meetings (C&M) committee of IAPR (2008-2014); Past chair of theIAPR Technical Committee on Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (TC3) (2004-2008); He is co-editor of the book "Machine Learning in Document Analysis and Recognition" published by Springer Verlag in 2008. He is author of more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and editor of four volumes.