============================================================================ IAPR TC11 Newsletter January 2011 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICDAR 2011, Beijing, March 1, 2011 * Calls for Papers - ICDAR 2011, Beijing, September 18-21 (2nd CfP) - 1st Int. Workshop on Imaging, Collection and Processing of Historical Documents, September 16-17 (in conjunction with ICDAR 2011) - 5th Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND 2011), September 17th (in conjunction with ICDAR 2011) * Announcements of New Datasets - PRImA Layout Analysis dataset * IJDAR Contents Telegram (Volume 13 Number 4) * Job Opportunities - PhD positions in the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group, Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain - Internship at Xerox Research Centre Europe, France * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the first edition of our TC-11 newsletter in 2011. For the New Year I would like to wish you all the best including success in publishing your latest research results and acquiring funding for many new and interesting projects. This edition of the newsletter brings to you a wealth of news from the area of Reading Systems. First, you will find the second call for papers for the upcoming ICDAR to be held in Bejing, which also serves as a gentle reminder that the paper submission deadline for this year's top conference in the area of Reading Systems is less than two months from now. Additionally, there are already two Calls for Papers for workshops held in conjunction with ICDAR available: For the 1st Int. Workshop on Imaging, Collection and Processing of Historical Documents and for the 5th Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND 2011). Furthermore, in this edition you will find the announcement of the PRImA Layout Analysis dataset, a new edition of the IJDAR Contents Telegram, and two Job Opportunities (at CVC, Barcelona and at the Xerox Research Centre Europe). Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICDAR 2011, Beijing September 18-21 March 1 (http://www.icdar2011.org/) - Tutorial proposals: April 20 (ext.) * CAIP 2011, Seville August 29-31 March 25 (http://congreso.us.es/caip2011/) * Workshop on Imaging, September 16-17 June 10 Collection and Processing (at ICDAR 2011) of Historical Documents (http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~hdocp) * AND 2011, (at ICDAR 2011) September 17th June 14 (http://sites.google.com/site/and2011workshop/) ============================================================================ ========== 2nd Call for Papers: ICDAR 2011 ================================= 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2011 Website: http://www.icdar2011.org Sep.18 - 21, 2011 Beijing, China CALL FOR PAPERS We are pleased to announce that the Eleventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2011), sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) TC-10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC-11 (Reading Systems), will be held at Beijing Friendship Hotel, Beijing, China during September 18-21, 2011. ICDAR is an outstanding international forum for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience for identifying, encouraging and exchanging ideas on the state-of-the-art in document analysis, understanding, retrieval, and performance evaluation, including various forms of multimedia documents. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Character Recognition Handwriting Recognition Graphics Recognition Document Image Analysis Document Understanding Document Analysis Systems Basic Research and Methodologies for Document Processing Camera-based Document Processing Document Databases and Digital Libraries Multimedia Documents Sketching Interfaces Performance Evaluation Forensic Documents Historical Documents Applications Paper Submission Manuscripts of maximum five pages are encouraged to be submitted. Papers must describe original work on any of the ICDAR related topics. The format templates and instructions for paper submission will be available in the Conference web site. Important deadline Manuscript due: March 1, 2011 Acceptance notification: June 1, 2011 Camera-ready manuscript due: July 1, 2011 Advance registration due: July 1, 2011 Tutorial proposals due: April 20, 2011 (extended) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: Workshop on Imaging, Collection and Processing of Historical Documents ========================= Call for Papers: First International Workshop on Imaging, Collection and Processing of Historical Documents, Beijing, China, September 16-17, 2011 http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~hdocp In association with ICDAR 2011, The 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Beijing, China, September 18-21, 2011 Recent years have shown an increased interest in scanning, indexing and providing access to historical documents held in archives and special collections – documents that are often inaccessible to the world in general. To respond to this interest, this workshop seeks to bring together research in all aspects of imaging, collection and processing of historical documents. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Imaging and Image Acquisition - Imaging for fragile materials - Multispectral imaging - Camera-based/non-invasive acquisition - Case studies/applications Digital Archiving Considerations - Compression issues - Measuring essential resolution (color, spatial) and metadata - Modeling of document image degradation Historical Collections - Military records, personal journals, church records, medieval manuscripts, etc. - Scientific, technical and educational documents - Documents from the world cultural heritage, - Government archives, multi-language Document Restoration/Improving readability - Removing or minimizing damages, defects, ink-bleed - Completing and filling in missing pieces based on context, prior knowledge, supporting documents, i.e. inpainting, etc. - Machine-learning algorithms for enhancement based on example images - Interactive tools from a user viewpoint - Learning from user-directed image enhancement Content Extraction (within the context of historical documents) - Content-based retrieval - Automated or semi-automated transcription - Content recognition based on surrounding and supporting context - Ontologies for modeling historical document content Family History Documents and Genealogies - Personal, Family, National and Historical Collections of Family Genealogy and Histories - Extracting and linking names, dates, places, etc. - Extracting, linking and piecing together personal and family histories and narratives - Discovering historical social networks Automated Classification, Grouping and Hyperlinking of Historical Documents - Style identification (typography of printed text, handwriting style recognition for manuscript authentication or author identification...) - Searching for Documents over the Internet - On-line & web-based navigation within/among document images - Searching/querying, retrieval, summarizing/condensing of document images - Collecting, linking, analysis and search technologies - Parallel tagging of images, transcripts, and other document layers Paper Submission: Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers in all areas relating to Imaging, Collection and Processing of Historical Documents. Manuscripts of maximum eight pages are encourage to be submitted. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the Workshop web site. The deadline for paper submissions is June 10, 2011. Accepted papers will be published electronically and in the conference proceedings. Important Dates: June 10, 2011 Manuscripts due July 10, 2011 Acceptance notification August 10, 2011 Camera-ready manuscript due August 10, 2011 Advance registration due Workshop Fees*: Full Registration USD $100 Student Registration USD $50 *Registration will be handled through ICDAR Workshop Organizers: General Chairs: William A. Barrett (Computer Science, Brigham Young University) Michael S. Brown (School of Computing, National University of Singapore) Program Chair: R. Manmatha (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) Organizing Chair: Jake Gehring (Manager, FamilySearch Data Operations, USA) Program Committee: * Apostolos Antonacopoulos (School of Computing, University of Salford, UK) * Mohamed Cheriet (École deTechnologie Supérieure, Montréal, Canada) * Xiaoqing Ding (Tsinghua University, China) * David Doermann (Inst. of Advanced Computer Studies, U. of Maryland, USA) * Scott Eldredge (Digital Reformating Manager, Brigham Young University, USA) * Basilis Gatos (National Center for Scientific Research, Greece) * Jake Gehring (FamilySearch, Digital Acquistion, processing & distribution, USA) * Venu Govindaraju (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) * C.J. Jawahar (Int' Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India) * LianWen Jin (South China University of Technology, China) * George Landon (Eastern Kentucky University, USA) * Cheng-Lin Liu (NLPR, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) * Josep Lladós (CVC-UAB, Barcelona, Spain) * Shijian Lu (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore) * R. Manmatha (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) * Simone Marinai (University of Florence, Italy) * Heath Nielson (FamilySearch, USA) * Liangrui Peng (Tsinghua University, China) * Alexandra Psarrou (University of Westminster, UK) * Eric Ringger (Brigham Young University, USA) * Zhixin Shi (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) * Chew Lim Tan (National University of Singapore, Singapore) * Eugene Walach (IBM Corporation, Haifa Research Lab, Israel) Contact: For further information please contact: William Barrett Department of Computer Science Brigham Young University Provo, Utah USA Phone: 801-422-7430 Fax: 801-422-0169 E-mail: barrett@cs.byu.edu ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: AND 2011 ======================================= CALL FOR PAPERS Fifth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND 2011) In conjunction with 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) September 17th, 2011 Beijing, China Noisy unstructured text data is ubiquitous and abundant in real-world situations. Handling noisy text poses new challenges for Information Extraction (IE), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR) and Knowledge Management (KM). Special handling of noise as well as noise-robust IR and KM techniques are essential to overcome these challenges. As in the case of AND 07, 08, 09, and 10, we intend that AND 2011 will provide researchers an opportunity to present their latest results toward addressing these challenges. We seek papers dealing with all aspects of noisy unstructured text data, its processing and applications. We particularly encourage contributions that look toward solving real life problems. Important Dates Abstract Submission: June 7th, 2011 Paper Submission: June 14th, 2011 Notification of Acceptance: July 25th, 2011 Camera-Ready papers due: August 8th, 2011 Additional information will provided on the AND 2011 website: http://sites.google.com/site/and2011workshop/ AND 2011 Co-Chairs: Daniel Lopresti, Lehigh U. Christoph Ringlestetter, U of Munich Shourya Roy, Xerox, India Lipika Dey, TCS India ============================================================================ ========== Announcement of New Dataset: PRImA Layout Analysis ============== New Release of PRImA Layout Analysis Dataset Following a complete redesign of the website and an upgrade to the latest and final ground truth format, the PRImA Layout Analysis dataset is now available. The dataset contains realistic documents with a wide variety of layouts, reflecting the various challenges in layout analysis. Particular emphasis is placed on magazines and technical/scientific publications which are likely to be the focus of digitisation efforts. Each image in the dataset has associated comprehensive and detailed ground truth enabling in-depth evaluation. Free access to the dataset is via registration at: http://dataset.primaresearch.org/ Please note that the images used for the ICDAR2009 Page Segmentation Competition form part of the dataset and can be downloaded readily as a pre-selected set. ============================================================================ ========== IJDAR Contents Telegram (Volume 13 Number 4) ==================== Table of contents for International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) Volume 13, Number 4 / December 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/1433-2833/13/4/ A combination of features for symbol-independent writer identification in old music scores Authors Alicia Fornés, Josep Lladós, Gemma Sánchez, Xavier Otazu and Horst Bunke Pages 243-259 Skew detection in document images based on rectangular active contour Authors Huijie Fan, Linlin Zhu and Yandong Tang Pages 261-269 MC-JBIG2: an improved algorithm for Chinese textual image compression Authors Kui Hu, Zhi Tang, Liangcai Gao and Yadong Mu Pages 271-284 Building a multi-modal Arabic corpus (MMAC) Authors Ashraf AbdelRaouf, Colin A. Higgins, Tony Pridmore and Mahmoud Khalil Pages 285-302 Document image binarization using background estimation and stroke edges Authors Shijian Lu, Bolan Su and Chew Lim Tan Pages 303-314 ============================================================================ ========== Job Opportunities =============================================== Open PhD positions in the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis group (DAG) is formed by 15 researchers from different countries, specifically devoted to research and development of pattern recognition and computer vision techniques applied to document analysis. More information on the group can be found at http://dag.cvc.uab.es. The group opens PhD positions in any of the research areas of the group, including graphics recognition, analysis of historical documents, categorization, indexing and retrieval of documents, shape recognition, handwriting analysis, and syntactic and structural pattern recognition. Successful candidates will become doctoral students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The scholarship is given for a maximum of 4 years provided successful progress. It includes a master degree on Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence during the first year and should lead to a final PhD dissertation. The candidate must perform high quality research leading to the publication of papers in well-known international conferences and journals with high impact factor. Qualifications and skills required: * Bachelor degree in Computer Science or a related field such as electrical, telecommunications engineering, Mathematics or Physics. * Good mathematical understanding. * High motivation for research. * Capability of working in an autonomous way. * Good programming skills in C++ and Matlab. * Good communication skills in English, both in written and oral form. * Learning or Pattern Recognition techniques will be an asset. Applicants should submit: 1) Application letter 2) Curriculum Vitae and Academic Record 3) Letters of Reference (if available) Send required information to: Ernest Valveny: ernest@cvc.uab.es Campus UAB, Edifici O 08193, Bellaterra Barcelona, Spain Tel. +34 93 581 1863 Fax +34 93 581 1670 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internship at Xerox Research Centre Europe, France: Automatic Form Model Generation Automatic Form Processing consists in extracting useful information from forms filled in by hand or machine. This task is generally composed of two steps: form categorization and information extraction. The first step, form categorization, requires a set of known form templates. The goal of these templates is to guide the information extraction step by selecting zones of interest in the form on which Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is performed. This internship aims at investigating and developing methods for automatically inferring rich form templates. We will suppose, alike existing techniques, that OCR is systematically applied to forms. Template inference will then be based on information provided by OCR. Rich templates will describe forms by combining geometrical and content information. The goal of the geometrical and content constraints is to guide the information extraction step (by providing location and content type information). The investigated methods will rely on unsupervised techniques (no annotated data). Objectives of this internship: * Collect of relevant literature * Design of algorithms for template inference (unsupervised methods) * Implementation of a prototype The candidate must have interest in research and exploratory work. Good programming skills are required. Duration: 6 months Start Date: Spring 2011 Location: Xerox Research Centre Europe, France Contact: Hervé Déjean (herve.dejean@xrce.xerox.com) http://www.xrce.xerox.com/About-XRCE/Internships/Automatic-Form-Model-Generation ============================================================================ ========== Call for Contributions ========================================== This newsletter needs your support in order to provide useful information to the TC11 community. Therefore, please contribute relevant news by sending a short notice to the newsletter editor Gernot A. Fink . Such news could be the obvious announcements of conferences and workshops, job opportunities, reports on past conferences, book reviews, or anything that might be of interest to a wider audience involved in the construction of reading systems. ============================================================================ ========== Subscription Information ======================================== This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To manage your subscription, please visit the mailing list homepage at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11 The homepage for IAPR TC11 is http://www.iapr-tc11.org ============================================================================