============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter September 2013 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - DAS 2014, Tours, France September 30 - Int. Conf. Nat. Sci. & Tech. in Manuscript Analysis September 30 (ext.) Hamburg, Germany * New and Recently Published Datasets * Survey: Topics for TC 11 Summer Schools on Document Analysis and Recognition * Call for Papers - Int. Conf. on Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis, Hamburg, Germany, December 4-6, 2013 * Call for Participation - MAURDOR-campaigns: Scanned documents processing evaluations * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the September edition of our TC-11 newsletter. First, I would like to draw your attention to a survey concerning future summer schools endorsed by TC 11. The TC 11 leadership team, would like to receive some feedback from the community that will help us better manage future proposals for similar educational activities. Therefore, we invite you to participate in the following short online survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BWG6GVT In this edition of the newsletter you will also find the Call for Papers for International Conference on Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis that will be held in December in Hamburg, Germany, and the Call for Participation for the next MAURDOR Evaluation Campaign. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ACPR 2013, Okinawa, Japan November 5-8 2013 -passed- (http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/ACPR2013/) * DAS 2014, Tours, France April 7-10 2014 September 30 (http://das2014.univ-tours.fr/) * Int. Conf. on Natural Sciences and December 4-6, 2013 September 30 Technology in Manuscript Analysis Hamburg, Germany (http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/register_natural_sciences.html) * ICPR 2014, Stockholm, Sweden August 24-28 2014 December 20 (http://www.icpr2014.org/) * ICFHR 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece September 1-4 2014 February 10 (http://www.icfhr2014.org/ ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== Name/Source of Dataset: Main Purpose: Published: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LRDE DBD Document Binarization Dataset (LRDE DBD) 05/2013 http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/LRDE_Document_Binarization_Dataset_(LRDE_DBD) PHIBD 2012 Persian Heritage Image Binarization Dataset 05/2013 http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Persian_Heritage_Image_Binarization_Dataset_(PHIBD_2012) For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ========== Survey: Topics for TC 11 Summerschool =========================== Following the success of the TC11 endorsed "International Document Image Processing School" (IDIPS 2013) this year (see & ), and given that a possible second edition of IDIPS is currently under consideration, TC11 would like to receive some feedback from the community that will help us better manage future proposals for similar educational activities. In order to ensure that such future educational activities are accessible to the majority of TC11 members, and that the scientific programme of such activities is as interesting and useful as possible, TC11 would like to seek the views of the research community with regard to the topics to be covered by TC 11 summer schools and possible dates for their organisation. We therefore invite you to participate to an online survey that you can access at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BWG6GVT The survey comprises 4 questions, and should not take more than a couple of minutes to complete. Looking forward to your feedback! The TC11 leadership team ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: Manuscript Analysis ============================ International Conference on Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis 4 - 6 December 2013, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg In recent years, manuscript analysis has received increasing support from methods based on natural sciences and technology. This conference will bring together scientists engaged in this interdisciplinary work and provide a forum for discussion and for presenting new methods and results. Contributions are solicited for original research work illuminating the role of natural sciences and technology in manuscript analysis, for example in areas such as: - Recovering lost writing - Image analysis of visual manuscript features - Material analysis of writing material - Cutting edge techniques The conference will be hosted by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg, registration will be free. The program will be structured around focus areas and consist of invited talks, contributed talks and poster sessions. Call for Papers --------------- The conference will consist of invited talks, contributed talks and poster sessions. Abstracts will be reviewed by the International Advisory Board members who will make recommendations for oral or poster presentations. Deadline for paper submission is September 30, 2013. Please note the instructions for authors of abstracts in the complete Call for Papers: http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/register_natural_sciences.html For submitting your abstracts, please use the email address manuscript-cultures [at] uni-hamburg.de Oral presentations - Contributed oral presentations are 30 min (20 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion). - Invited oral presentations are 60 min (45 min for presentation and 15 min for discussion). Poster presentations There will be poster presentations with panels for A0 posters. Important Dates --------------- 30.09.13 (deadline extended) Submission of Extended Abstract (2 pages) 31.10.13 (deadline extended) Notification of Acceptance 15.11.13 (deadline extended) Deadline for conference registration 04.-06.12.13 Conference Invited Speakers ---------------- Roger Easton (Rochester Institute of Technology, N.Y., USA) Doris Oltrogge (University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany) Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra (EPHE-Sorbonne, Paris, France) Lior Wolf (Tel Aviv University, Israel) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Participation: MAURDOR Campaigns ======================= MAURDOR-campaigns: Scanned documents processing evaluations Presentation Scanned documents processing is an important issue for information retrieval. The MAURDOR campaigns aim at assessing the progress of automatic systems in this area. The goal is to evaluate the ability of the systems to extract relevant information in scanned documents. After the success of the first campaign that took place in spring 2013, the Laboratoire national de me'trologie et d'essais (LNE) and CASSIDIAN, an EADS company, will conduct a new MAURDOR evaluation campaign in order to support research in Scanned documents processing and help advancing the state of the art in Optical Characters Recognition technologies. The LNE and CASSIDIAN provide the following to participants: - Consistent data for training, development and test sets. - Automatic scoring tools. - Common rules needed to assess different steps essential for scanned documents processing. A workshop will be organized at the end of the campaign to account for the results and compare the approaches of various participants. The evaluation plan is available at www.maurdor-campaign.org A heterogeneous database The MAURDOR evaluations are based on a very heterogeneous database. The training set is multilingual (English, French, And Arabic) and consists of 7,000 different documents corresponding to the following classes: - Blank forms and completed forms (around 12% of the database) - Typewritten commercial documents with sometimes several manual annotations (around 40% of the database) - Handwritten personal letters with sometimes typewritten headers (around 25% of the database) - Commercial letters such as purchase orders or bills (around 20% of the database) - Other documents like newspapers articles or maps...(around 3% of the database). The test set contains 1,000 documents. The proportion of documents belonging to different categories is the same as for the training data Tasks MAURDOR is based on a complete processing chain in which five separate modules are implemented. Each module performs a particular function contributing to the complete processing of a scanned document. The following five modules are independently assessed during the campaign: - Task 1: Segmentation and typing areas (table, text, image...) - Task 2: Type writing characterization (handwritten or typewritten characters) - Task 3: Language identification - Task 4: Optical Characters Recognition - Task 5: Establishing reading order and relations between areas Participants can submit systems for individual tasks of their choice. An evaluation will also be performed for an operational application as an end-to-end processing chain. It is evaluated in a keyword spotting scenario. How to participate? This evaluation is intended to be of interest of all researchers working on the problem of scanned documents processing. The only requirement is the participation in the closing workshop. All the participants must attend the evaluation workshop and be prepared to discuss their system(s), their results in detail. To participate it is sufficient to fill out the registration form available at www.maurdor-campaign.org Important dates Evaluation plan released 01/07/2013 Training data available 01/07/2013 Beginning of the campaign 04/11/2013 End of the campaign 02/01/2014 Beginning of the adjudication 02/01/2014 End of the adjudication 10/01/2014 Workshop February 2014 ============================================================================ ========== Call for Dataset Submissions ==================================== We would like to remind you that the TC10 and TC11 welcome contributions of new datasets or other resources related to the community. We would like to particularly encourage authors of articles that introduce new datasets, software or other material to submit such material to TC11 for hosting. Please check the TC11 site on information about how to submit datasets for archiving ( http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets) also feel free to contact Marcus Liwicki, the TC11 dataset curator, for any doubts you might have on the process. Marcus Liwicki, TC-11 Dataset Curator liwicki@dfki.uni-kl.de ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================