============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter July 2014 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - DRR 2015, San Francisco, USA July 28 (extended!) - ICFHR 2018, [in a nice place] August 18 (proposal for hosting) * New and Recently Published Datasets * Call for Hosting Proposals: - Int. Conf. on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) 2018 * Call for Papers: - Document Recognition and Retrieval XXII (DRR 2015), San Francisco, February 11-12, 2015 - 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR 2014), Singapore, November 2, 2014 (in conjunction with ACCV 2014) [Confirmed date and invited speakers] * Announcement: - Prof. Jin Hyung Kim retires from KAIST, Korea. * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the July edition of our TC-11 newsletter. With this edition I would like to draw your attention to the call for submitting Proposals for Hosting ICFHR 2018, one of the major events organized by the TC-11 community. As you may know, the decision about bids for hosting ICFHR 2018 will be taken by a vote of the attendants of ICFHR 2014 during a special session. Therefore, if you are interested in organizing ICFHR in four years from now, please submit your proposal and prepare a nice presentation for convincing the TC-11 community gathering in Crete in September. Additionally, you will find below the second Call for Papers for DRR 2015 (submission deadline extended to July 28), an updated Call for Papers for IWRR 2014 (date and invited speakers confirmed) and the announcement of Prof. Jin Hyung Kim's retirement from KAIST, Korea. Gernot A. Fink, IAPR-TC11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ACCV 2014, Singapore November 1-5 June 20 (http://www.accv2014.org/) * DRR 2015, San Francisco, USA February 11-12, 2015 July 28 (ext.!) (http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015) * IWRR 2014, Singapore November 2 September 12 (http://imlab.jp/iwrr2014/) * CVPR 2015, Bosten, United States June 8-10, 2015 November 14 (http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/) * IWCF 2014, Stockholm, Sweden August 24 - passed - (http://www.isical.ac.in/~iwcf2014) * ICPR 2014, Stockholm, Sweden August 24-28 - passed - (http://www.icpr2014.org/) * ICFHR 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece September 1-4 - passed - (http://www.icfhr2014.org/) * BMVC 2014, Nottingham, UK September 1-5 - passed - (http://bmvc2014.cs.nott.ac.uk/) * GCPR 2014, Mu"nster, Germany September 2-5 - passed - http://cvpr.uni-muenster.de/GCPR2014/ ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== Dataset: Main Purpose: Published: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * CROHME Recognition of Online HW Math Expressions 2/2014 (more than 10k expressions from 100s of writers) http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/CROHME:_Competition_on_Recogntion_of_Online_Handwritten_Mathematical_Expressions ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ========== Call for Hosting Proposals: ICFHR 2018 ========================== Call for Hosting Proposals for ICFHR 2018 ----------------------------------------- Continuing a long tradition, the international research community plans to gather in Crete Island, Greece for the 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition on September 1-4, 2014 (http://www.icfhr2014.org/). In keeping with the practice of the community, proposals are now being solicited for hosting ICFHR 2018, the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. ICFHR is the premier event for identifying, encouraging, and exchanging ideas in handwriting recognition research, as well as for promoting novel applications at the frontiers of this important field. The single-track conference brings together leading researchers and practitioners in on-line and off-line handwriting recognition. The series of the ICFHR conferences is a continuation of the ten IWFHRs (Montreal 1990, Chateau de Bonas 1991, Buffalo 1993, Taipei 1994, Colchester 1996, Taejon 1998, Amsterdam 2000, Niagara on the Lake 2002, Tokyo 2004, La Baule 2006). Previous ICFHR conferences were held in Montreal 2008, Kolkata 2010 and Bari 2012. The 15th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR 2016, is scheduled to be held in Shenzhen, China, on October 24-16, 2016. Individuals and groups who are interested in handwriting recognition research are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting ICFHR 2018. According to the normal rotation, the year 2018 would see the conference located somewhere in the Americas, but proposals from other locales are encouraged as well. Proposals should be sent to: Koichi Kise, TC-11 Chair, kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC-11 Vice Chair, dimos@cvc.uab.es The deadline for submitting written proposals is Monday, August 18. In addition, proposers should be prepared to make a brief presentation to the community during a special session at ICFHR 2014 after which time a vote will be taken to determine the winning bid. The special session is scheduled just before the social event (Wednesday afternoon, 3 September 2014). Questions concerning the proposal process can be addressed to Koichi Kise and Dimosthenis Karatzas. ============================================================================ ========== 2nd Call for Papers: DRR 2015 =================================== --------------------------------------------------- Document Recognition and Retrieval XXII (DRR 2015) --------------------------------------------------- http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015 San Francisco, February 11-12, 2015 Document Recognition and Retrieval (DRR) is one of the leading international conferences devoted to current research in document analysis, recognition and retrieval. The 22nd Document Recognition and Retrieval Conference is being held as part of the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposium taking place in San Francisco, California, USA. The conference venue and hotel will be the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. DRR specifically will take place February 11-12, 2015. The Conference Chairs and Program Committee invite all researchers working on document recognition and retrieval to submit original research papers. Papers are presented in oral and poster sessions at the conference, along with invited talks by leading researchers. Accepted papers will be published by the SPIE in the conference proceedings. Papers will also be indexed by DBLP. At the conference a Best Student Paper Award will be presented. Papers are solicited in, but not limited to, the areas below. (Conference web page: http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015) DOCUMENT RECOGNITION * Text recognition: machine-printed documents, handwritten documents; paper, tablet, camera, and video sources * Writer/style identification, verification, and adaptation * Graphics recognition: vectorization (e.g. for line-art, maps and technical drawings), signature, logo and graphical symbol recognition, figure, chart and graph recognition, and diagrammatic notations (e.g. music, mathematical notation) * Document layout analysis and understanding: document and page region segmentation, form and table recognition, and document understanding through combined modalities (e.g. speech and images) * Evaluation: performance metrics, document degradation models, data collection, benchmarking, ground-truthing * Additional topics: document image filtering, enhancement and compression, document clustering and classification, machine learning (e.g. integration and optimization of recognition modules), historical and degraded document images (e.g. fax), multilingual document recognition, and web page analysis (including wikis and blogs). DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL * Indexing and summarization: text documents (messages, blogs, etc.), imaged documents, entity tagging from OCR output, and text categorization * Query languages and modalities: content-based image retrieval (CBIR) for documents, keyword spotting, non-textual query-by-example (e.g. tables, figures, math), querying by document geometry and/or logical structure, approximate string matching algorithms for OCR output, retrieval of noisy text documents (messages, blogs, etc.), cross and multi-lingual retrieval * Discovery and browsing: pattern discovery, trend mining, topic modeling and analysis, clustering * Evaluation: relevance and performance metrics, evaluation protocols, and benchmarking * Additional topics: relevance feedback, impact of recognition accuracy on retrieval performance, and digital libraries including systems engineering and quality assurance. IMPORTANT DATES * 16 July 2014: Submit abstract * 28 July 2014: Full paper submission deadline. -- Deadline extended * 7 October 2014: Author notifications * 1 December 2014: Submission deadline: Manuscript for On-site Proceedings * 11-12 February 2015: Conference PAPER SUBMISSION Standard minimum paper length for all SPIE events is 6 pages. However, for DRR, we strongly encourage the authors to submit longer papers (ideally 8-12 pages). The review process will take into account both the quality and the depth of development of the scientific and experimental content of a paper. Papers should clearly identify the problem addressed in the work, identify the original contribution(s) of the paper, relate the paper to previous work, justify and document the methods of the paper, and provide substantive experimental and/or theoretical evaluation. The program committee will favor papers that take advantage of the opportunity to develop, argue, and provide compelling experimental evidence. We recommend using the SPIE LaTeX template for preparing submissions (http://kmh-lanl.hansonhub.com/spie/). Submissions should be uploaded through the SPIE conference website (http://spie.org). For accepted submissions, the final manuscripts to be published in the proceedings are expected also to be a minimum of 6 pages in the same format. For more information visit http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015 . Questions concerning the conference may also be addressed to: drr2015@googlegroups.com CONFERENCE CHAIRS * Eric K. Ringger, Brigham Young Univ. (United States) * Bart Lamiroy, Universite' de Lorraine & LORIA (France) PROGRAM COMMITTEE * Gady Agam, Illinois Institute of Technology (United States) * Sameer K. Antani, National Library of Medicine (United States) * Elisa H. Barney Smith, Boise State Univ. (United States) * William A. Barrett, Brigham Young Univ. (United States) * Kathrin Berkner, Ricoh Innovations, Inc. (United States) * Bertrand Cou"asnon, Institut National des Sciences Applique'es de Rennes (France) * Herve' De'jean, Xerox Research Ctr. Europe Grenoble (France) * Xiaoqing Ding, Tsinghua Univ. (China) * David S. Doermann, Univ. of Maryland, College Park (United States) * Jianying Hu, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Ctr. (United States) * Ergina Kavallieratou, Univ. of the Aegean (Greece) * Christopher Kermorvant, A2iA SA (France) * Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Telecom ParisTech (France) * Xiaofan Lin, A9.com, Inc. (United States) * Marcus Liwicki, Deutsches Forschungszentrum fu"r Ku"nstliche Intelligenz GmbH (Germany) * Daniel P. Lopresti, Lehigh Univ. (United States) * Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute (India) * Sargur N. Srihari, Univ. at Buffalo (United States) * Venkata Subramaniam, IBM India Research Lab. (India) * Kazem Taghva, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas (United States) * George R. Thoma, National Library of Medicine (United States) * Christian Viard-Gaudin, Univ. de Nantes (France) * Berrin Yanikoglu, Sabanci Univ. (Turkey) * Pingping Xiu, Microsoft (United States) * Richard Zanibbi, Rochester Institute of Technology (United States) * Jie Zou, National Library of Medicine (United States) ============================================================================ ========== Call for Papers: IWRR 2014 ====================================== First International Workshop on Robust Reading (in conjunction with ACCV 2014) ----------------------------------------------- November 2, 2014 National University of Singapore, Singapore Web: http://imlab.jp/iwrr2014/ Interpreting written communication (textual or symbolic) is one of the most important human activities. It is, however, one of the most difficult ones for computers to realize and has been recognized as an unsolved challenge. In the community of Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR), research on unconstrained reading systems has been of central interest. The series of ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), which is held in conjunction with biannual International Conference of Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), has played an important role, especially, by providing standardized datasets that have become the de-facto evaluation benchmarks in the area and providing an opportunity to compare methods. Recently, this kind of research, especially research on reading scene text, has attracted the interest and is increasingly accepted by the wider computer vision (CV) community. Papers on related topics have been consistently presented in major CV conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and ACCV. In these papers, ICDAR RRC datasets are used as standard measures of methods. Responding to this trend, we organize the First International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR 2014) in conjunction with ACCV 2014. The workshop aims at turning the spotlight on the challenge of unconstrained reading systems. The goal of the workshop is to attract the wider CV community to put research efforts on this challenging research topic, as well as to motivate many researchers from the DAR community to attend ACCV 2014. Topics of Interest --------------------------- Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - Scene text localisation, segmentation, and recognition - Reading scene and/or overlaid text in video sequences - Text localisation, segmentation, and recognition in born-digital images - Restoration of camera captured documents (dewarping, deblurring, etc.) - Quality estimation and degradation modelling of camera-captured text - Performance evaluation and metrics - Applications such as translation, reading text for the blind, etc - Graphical content interpretation in complex settings Submission --------------------------- The workshop organizers welcome original technical papers related to the workshop topics. All submissions must follow the guideline of ACCV 2014. Namely, submissions must be a maximum of 14 pages (not including references). Supplementary material can be submitted. Submissions, including supplementary material, must be self-contained. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the workshop program committee in a double blind manner (so all submissions must be anonymised). Papers violating the formatting rules will be rejected without review. There is another way of submission; submit your paper to ACCV2014 and designate IWRR as the "optional workshop." Please see the workshop webpage for more detail. Publication --------------------------- Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, which will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and also contained in the USB stick distributed in the conference site. Accepted papers must be registered and presented; otherwise they will not be included in the workshop proceedings. The workshop organizers welcome technical papers with novel, thought-provoking work and ideas relating to the workshop topics. All submissions must be formatted in ACCV 2014 format and contain original work that is not being published or under review elsewhere. Each submission will undergo a double-blind reviewing process. All accepted papers will be published online on the workshop website. More information can be found on the workshop website. Important Dates --------------------------- Paper submission due: September 10, 2014 Author Notification: September 24, 2014 Camera-ready paper due: September 30, 2014 Keynote Talks (New!) --------------------------- - Title TBA by Lukas Neumann and Prof. Jiri Matas (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic) - PhotoOCR: Reading Text in Uncontrolled Conditions by Dr. Alessandro Bissacco (Google Inc.) Co-Chairs --------------------------- Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture Univ., Japan) Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Centre, Spain) Faisal Shafait (Univ. of Western Australia, Australia) Pramod Sankar Kompalli (Xerox Research India, India) Program Committee --------------------------- Alessandro Bissacco (Google, USA) Sergi Belongie (Cornell Univ., USA) Bernard Ghanem (King Abdullah Univ. of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia) Erik Learned-Miller (Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, USA) Raghavan Manmatha (Amazon.com, USA) Jiri Matas (Czech Technical University, Czech Republic) Gaofeng Meng (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) Ajmal Saeed Mian (Univ. of Western Australia, Australia) Ray Smith (Google, USA) Palaiahnakote Shivakumara (National University of Malaya, Malaysia) Jun Sun (Fujitsu R&D China, China) Phan Quy Trung (National Univ. of Singapore, Singapore) Seiichi Uchida (Kyushu Univ., Japan) Kai Wang (Google, USA) Jerod J. Weinman (Grinnell College, USA) Inquiries: iwrr2014-inquiry@ml.osakafu-u.ac.jp ============================================================================ ============================================================================ ========== Announcement: Prof. Jin Hyung Kim retires from KAIST ============ Prof. Jin Hyung Kim will retire at his retirement age after his 29 year's dedication to KAIST and Computer Science Area. Now he is starting his new role as the first director of Software Policy & Research Institute (http://www.spri.kr) to suggest the future and the direction of Software Industry of South Korea. His retirement ceremony is held on 20th September 2014. It would be great honor to have your congratulatory letter for Prof. Kim about his retirement and his new role. You can leave a letter or can say hello to Prof. Kim via https://sites.google.com/site/congratsdrkim/ If you have any questions, please mail to Daehwan Kim (ofreunde@gmail.com) ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================