============================================================================ IAPR TC-11 Newsletter December 2014 http://www.iapr-tc11.org ========== Contents ======================================================== * Message from the Editor * Dates 'n' Deadlines - ICDAR 2015, Gammarath, Tunisia January 15, 2015 * New and Recently Published Datasets * Event Reports - Report on the 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR2014) * Job Advertisement - Postdoctoral positions at the CVC, University of Barcelona * Call for Dataset Submissions * Call for Contributions ============================================================================ ========== Message from the Editor ========================================= Welcome to the December edition of our TC-11 newsletter. This edition brings to you a report on the 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR2014) which was held in conjunction with ACCV 2014. Furthermore, you will find below job advertisements for a number of postdoctoral positions available from the Spanish research system for which the Computer Vision Center (CVC) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona can act as a host. I would like to wish you all a quiet and peaceful time during the upcoming Christmas season and all the best for a happy and successful New Year! Gernot A. Fink, IAPR TC-11 Newsletter Editor Gernot.Fink@udo.edu ============================================================================ ========== Dates 'n' Deadlines ============================================= Event/Location/Web: Event Date: Deadline (paper submission): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * ICDAR 2015, Gammarath, Tunisia August 23-26, 2015 January 15, 2015 (http://2015.icdar.org/) * ICCV 2015, Santiago, Chile December 13-16, 2015 April 30, 2015 (http://pamitc.org/iccv15/) * ACPR 2015, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia November 3-6, 2015 June 1, 2015 (http://acpr2015.org/) * DRR 2015, San Francisco, USA February 11-12, 2015 - passed - (http://nlp.cs.byu.edu/drr2015) * CVPR 2015, Boston, United States June 8-10, 2015 - passed - (http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/) ============================================================================ ========== New and Recently Published: TC-11 Datasets ====================== For a list of all datasets available visit: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets_List ============================================================================ ========== Workshop Report: IWRR 2014 ======================================= Report on the 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR2014) (In conjunction with ACCV2014) http://imlab.jp/iwrr2014/ The 1st International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR2014) was held on November 2, 2014 in Singapore as a workshop of the 12th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2014). The workshop focused on Robust Reading, which refers to the methods and practices for automatically interpreting written information in unconstrained environments. On one hand, reading is one of the most important human activities and not difficult for most people. On the other hand, it is one of the most challenging tasks for computers. The Document Image Analysis and Recognition (DIAR) community, has been conducting research on this challenging task for more than a decade. A representative activity is the series of ICDAR Robust Reading Competitions held in 2003, 2005, 2011 and 2013 that have provided standardised datasets and have become the de-facto evaluation benchmarks for the community. Recently, the challenge has appealed to the wider Computer Vision (CV) community with many new contributions arriving from outside the strict DIAR area. In response to the situation above, we decided to organize this workshop in conjunction with a major Computer Vision conference to realize the first purpose of the workshop -to foster and develop further this interaction between the DIAR and the wider Computer Vision community. The second purpose was to turn the spotlight on the challenge and attract more people to the research topic. The workshop consisting of two keynote talks, 8 oral talks and a panel discussion attracted more than 30 participants. Two keynote talks were presented as follows. - "Text Reading in the Wild - How to make it useful?" Lukas Neumann & Prof. Jiri Matas (Czech Technical University in Prague) - "PhotoOCR: Reading Text in Uncontrolled Conditions" Dr. Alessandro Bissacco (Google Inc.) The accepted papers were published in the volume titled "ACCV 2014 Workshops" in the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) series. We had 13 submissions in total and 8 papers were accepted as oral presentations. The acceptance rate was 61.5%. The Best Paper Award received an award of 250 Singapore dollars sponsored by Xerox Research India and was presented to the paper titled "Perspective Scene Text Recognition with Feature Compression and Ranking" by Yu Zhou, Shuang Liu, Yongzheng Zhang, Yipeng Wang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Weiyao Lin (Shanghai Jiao Tong University). Finally, we would like to sincerely thank those who helped to ensure this workshop is a success: - Prof. CV Jawahar and Prof. Shiguang Shan (ACCV Workshop Co-Chairs) and Prof. Michael S. Brown (ACCV General Co-Chair) for their support - The members of the program committee for reviewing the submitted papers despite the very tight schedule - Xerox Research India for the generous sponsorship IWRR 2014 Co-Chairs Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture Univ., Japan) Dimosthenis Karatzas (CVC, Spain) Faisal Shafait (Univ. of Western Australia, Australia) Pramod Sankar Kompalli (Xerox Research India, India) ============================================================================ ========== Job Advertisement: PostDocs at the CVC, Barcelona ============== OPEN CALLS FOR POST DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWS Between now and February, the Spanish government will open a number of calls for post-doctoral researchers. The Document Analysis group at the Computer Vision Centre, can act as a host institution for these researchers and would be very interested in finding right candidates who might want to apply for these positions. If you are interested, please contact Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas (dimos@cvc.uab.es) or Dr Josep Llados (josep@cvc.uab.es) for further information. A short summary of the forthcoming calls follows below. 1. "Ramon y Cajal" Senior Research Fellowships - Application deadline: January 20. - Duration: 5 years - Salary: 31.6k EUR minimum (gross) - Additional funding: 40k EUR to be used during the first 4 years of the contract - Requirements: Candidates must have obtained the PhD between 01/01/2004 and 31/12/2011. They must have carried out research stays in research centers different than the one they will join for a period of 24 months. Note that researchers who have been awarded their bachelor's degree and their PhD outside the Spanish University system already fulfil this requirement. These are thought to be quite competitive calls, targeting candidates with the potential to setup and lead their own research line. Strong candidates are sought, with a good publication record (journal publications is a must) and signs of good leadership skills. - Further Information: http://www.cvc.uab.es/convocatories/2014/obertes/RYC%20CALL%202014.pdf 2. "Juan de la Cierva" Junior Research Fellowships - Application deadline: February 3. - Duration: 2 years - Salary: 21.5k EUR minimum (gross) - Requirements: PhD obtained between 01/01/13 to 31/12/14 - Further Information: http://www.cvc.uab.es/convocatories/2014/obertes/JDC%20CALL%202014.pdf 3. "Juan de la Cierva" Intermediate Research Fellowships - Application deadline: January 29. - Duration: 2 years - Salary: 25.0k EUR minimum (gross) - Additional funding: 6k EUR to be used throughout the contract to support research activities - Requirements: PhD obtained between 01/01/10 to 31/12/12 - Further Information: http://www.cvc.uab.es/convocatories/2014/obertes/JDC%20CALL%202014.pdf 4. "Beatriu de Pinos" (Modality B) Intermediate Fellowships - PhD obtained between 1/2008 and 12/2012 - Application deadline: February 2. - Duration: 2 years - Funding: 85k for salary costs and 6k for expenses related to the research activity for the period of two years. - Requirements: At least two years of postdoctoral experience outside Spain - Further Information: http://www.cvc.uab.es/convocatories/2014/obertes/BP-CALL%202014.pdf ============================================================================ ========== 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 ============================================================================