# IAPR TC-11 (READING SYSTEMS) NEWSLETTER<br>

## February, 2018

**Online, phone-friendly version:** [February 2018 Newsletter](<http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR-TC11:_Newsletter_2018/2)   
**TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org) &nbsp;&nbsp;  **Twitter:** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11)

### TABLE OF CONTENTS

- Message from the Editor 
- Dates and Deadlines
    - Deadlines
    - Upcoming Conference Dates
- ICFHR  
    - ICFHR 2018: Call for Papers 
    - ICFHR 2018 Workshops: Call for Proposals
      - Full Workshops
      - Birds of a Feather Workshops
    - ICFHR 2018 Tutorials: Call for Proposals
    - ICFHR 2018 Competitions: Call for Participation
- DAS 2018: Discussion Groups  
- ICPR: Competitions  
    - ICPR 2018: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification Competition (repost)
    - ICPR 2018 Contest on Fraud Detection: Call for Participation
- IJDAR
    - New Issue: IJDAR Dec. 2017 (Vol. 20, Issue 4)
    - IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)
- Careers
    - Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR List) - repost
- Datasets

Message from the Editor
=======================

Greetings - I hope that you have all been enjoying the Winter Olympics
these past couple weeks. For some of us, maybe even in person at
PyeongChang!

Deadlines for the **International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition ([ICFHR](http://icfhr2018.org))** are now fast approaching.
[Paper submission](http://icfhr2018.org/submit-paper.html) is open;
please note that reviewing will be double-blind. A number of
[competitions](http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html) are underway that
we encourage you to consider participating in. There is also a call for
**workshops at ICFHR**, both as 'standard' workshops, as well as less
formal 'birds-of-a-feather' meetings for discussing topics related to
handwriting recognition. A call for **tutorials at ICFHR** has also been
released. Niagara Falls provides a particularly nice environment for
thinking, walking and talking: we strongly encourage the community to
take advantage of this by submitting workshop and tutorial proposals
ASAP.

**DAS:** A call for participation in discussion groups at DAS 2018 in
Vienna has been posted. Attendees at DAS are encouraged to fill out the
form provided in the announcement at their earliest convenience, to help
the organizers plan these sessions.

**ICPR:** We have a couple of competitions from ICPR featured, on
personality detection in handwriting, and fraud detection in documents.
Please see the calls for participation for details.

In closing, I am happy to report that we have received proposals for the
TC-10/TC-11 summer school, and we hope to provide an update in the
newsletter next month.

**Join us!** If you are not already a member of the TC-11 community,
please consider joining the [TC11 mailing
list](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1).
**Follow us on Twitter (iapr\_tc11):** <https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11>

**Richard Zanibbi, TC-11 Communications Officer**  
( <rxzvcs@rit.edu> )

Dates and Deadlines
===================

Deadlines
---------

**2018**

-   **Mar. 1:** ICFHR 2018 Workshop and Tutorial Proposal deadline (
    [Call for Proposals](http://icfhr2018.org/submit.html) )
-   **Mar. 2/9:** ICFHR 2018 abstract/paper submissions ([Call for
    Papers](http://icfhr2018.org/pdf/ICFHR2018_CFP.pdf) )

Upcoming Conference Dates
-------------------------

**2018**

-   [ASAR 2018](http://asar.ieee.tn). London, UK (March 12-14, 2018)
-   [DAS 2018](https://das2018.caa.tuwien.ac.at). Vienna, Austria (24-27
    April, 2018)
-   [ICPRAI 2018](http://icprai2018.com). Montreal, Canada (May
    14-17, 2018)
-   [ICFHR 2018](https://icfhr2018.org). Niagara Falls, USA (August
    5-8, 2018)
-   [ICPR 2018](http://www.icpr2018.org). Beijing, China (August
    20-24, 2018)
-   [DocEng 2018](https://doceng.org/doceng2018). Halifax, Canada
    (August 28-31, 2018)

**2019 and Later**

-   [ICDAR 2019](http://www.icdar2019.org), Sydney, Australia (September
    22-25, 2019)
-   [ICFHR 2020](http://www.icfhr2020.org). Dortmund, Germany (September
    8-10, 2020)

ICFHR
=====

ICFHR 2018: Call for Papers
---------------------------

**The 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition**  
*August 5 - 8, 2018 - Niagara Falls, USA*  
Web page: [icfhr2018.org](http://icfhr2018.org)  
PDF Version of this Call:
[ICFHR2018\_CFP.pdf](http://icfhr2018.org/pdf/ICFHR2018_CFP.pdf)

**Important Dates**

    March 2, 2018  Paper abstract submission
    March 9, 2018  Full paper submission
     May 25, 2018  Author notifications
    June 22, 2018  Camera-ready papers due

The **International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition
(ICFHR)** is the flagship conference for handwriting recognition
research and applications. The conference brings together experts in
handwriting recognition from academia and industry to share their
experiences and promote research and development in all aspects of
handwriting recognition and handwriting applications.

**ICFHR 2018** is sponsored by the International Association for Pattern
Recognition (IAPR), and organized in part by [IAPR Technical Committee
No. 11 (Reading
Systems)](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/IAPR-TC11:Reading_Systems).

**Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited
to:**

-   Handwriting Recognition  
-   Cursive Script Recognition  
-   Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition  
-   Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding  
-   Language Models in Handwriting Recognition  
-   Web-Based Applications  
-   Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries  
-   Information Extraction & Retrieval  
-   Document Characterization  
-   Form Processing  
-   Word Spotting  
-   Bank-Check Processing  
-   Historical Document Processing  
-   Forensic Studies and Security Issues  
-   Writer Verification and Identification  
-   Performance Enhancement and System Evaluation  
-   Electronic Ink and Pen-Based Systems  
-   Other Offline and Online Applications

**Authors are invited to submit full-length papers of not more than six
(6) pages.** Papers must describe original work, and paper reviews will
be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on
the ICFHR 2018 web site ([icfhr2018.org](http://icfhr2018.org)).

Questions about paper submission should be directed to the Program
Chairs ( <pc@icfhr2018.org> ).

**Umapada Pal, Christian Viard-Gaudin and Luiz S. Oliveira, ICFHR
Program Chairs**  
( <umapada@isical.ac.in>, <christian.viard-gaudin@univ-nantes.fr>,
<lesoliveira@inf.ufpr.br> )

ICFHR 2018 Workshops: Call for Proposals
----------------------------------------

**Workshop Chairs:** Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés  
**Online:** <http://icfhr2018.org/workshops.html>

**Important Dates**

    Mar. 1:  Workshop proposal deadline
    Mar. 18: Notification to workshop organizers
    Apr. 20: Finalized workshop program (i.e., CFP) 

The **16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition (ICFHR 2018)** will take place in Niagara Falls New York,
USA 5-8 August 2018. For the first time the conference is also welcoming
bids for accompanying workshops. The workshops will take place on August
4 at the same venue as the main conference in Niagara Falls New York,
USA.

Workshops provide a forum for discussion topics that will not be fully
explored during the main conference, and provide opportunities for
in-depth discussion of technical and application issues. Workshops are
also a good opportunity to share ideas between researchers in industry
and academia, and therefore both are welcome to submit workshop
proposals. The ICFHR 2018 organizers will collect workshop
registrations, provide facilities, and distribute electronic copies of
the workshop proceedings.

**Two types of workshops are envisioned:**

1.  Full (mini-conference) workshops
2.  Birds of a Feather workshops

### Full Workshops

Full workshops would likely include papers, posters or presentations.
Full workshops may be half day or full day. We invite proposals for
workshops on topics related to handwriting recognition, including
domains that apply handwriting recognition such as the digital
humanities or forensics. We encourage workshop organizers to submit
proposals that are specific and detailed in justifying relevance and
viability.

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format by email to
<workshops@icfhr2018.org>. Please prefix the email subject with the
string '\[ICFHR 2018 Workshop\]'. Proposals should include the following
information:

1.  TECHNICAL INFORMATION
    -   Workshop title.
    -   Topics that will be covered, with descriptions of why they are
        relevant.
2.  ORGANIZERS AND SPEAKERS
    -   Organizers' names, titles and affiliations, with one,
        potentially two, contact emails of reliably responsive people.
    -   Background and experience that makes the proposers well suited
        for organizing the workshop.
    -   Names of invited speakers. For each speaker, please indicate if
        attendance is tentative or confirmed.
3.  LOGISTICS
    -   Preference for half-day or full-day event.
    -   Estimated numbers of orals, posters, and invited talks, with
        rough program outline.
    -   Expected number of paper submissions.
    -   Tentative program committee.
    -   Anticipated target audience and expected number of attendees.
    -   Special space or equipment requests, if any.
4.  WORKSHOP DATES
    -   Paper submission deadline.
    -   Notification to authors.
    -   Camera ready deadline.

### Birds of a Feather Workshops

Birds of a Feather workshops provide a forum for discussion of the
status and needs for further research within a particular subfield of
handwriting recognition, beyond the paper Q&A in a conference session.
Participants would optionally submit 500 word abstracts stating ideas
for discussion topics, and not recent research results. Participants
would not submit full papers and there would be no proceedings.

Birds of a feather workshops are envisioned to be at most a half day and
could be as little as two hours centered around coffee/tea or a meal to
increase informal discussion.

Meeting topics can be taken from any of the main ICFHR conference CFP
topics:

-   Handwriting Recognition of a particular family
-   Cursive Script Recognition
-   Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition
-   Handwritten Document Processing and Understanding
-   Language Models in Handwriting Recognition
-   Web-Based Applications
-   Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries
-   Information Extraction & Retrieval
-   Document Characterization
-   Form Processing
-   Word Spotting
-   Bank-Check Processing
-   Historical Document Processing
-   Forensic Studies and Security Issues
-   Writer Verification and Identification

Proposals should be submitted by email to <workshops@icfhr2018.org>.
Please prefix the email subject with the string \[ICFHR 2018 Workshop\].
Proposals should include the following information:

1.  TECHNICAL INFORMATION
    -   Workshop title.
    -   Topics that will be covered, with descriptions of why they are
        relevant.
2.  ORGANIZERS AND SPEAKERS
    -   Organizers' names, titles and affiliations, background and
        experience that makes the proposers well suited for leading the
        discussion.
3.  LOGISTICS
    -   Preference for half-day or two-hour event.

For any questions, please contact the workshop chairs at
<workshops@icfhr2018.org>.

**Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés, ICFHR Workshop and Tutorial
Chairs**  
( <ebarneysmith@boisestate.edu>, <afornes@cvc.uab.es> )

ICFHR 2018 Tutorials: Call for Proposals
----------------------------------------

**Tutorial Chairs:** Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés  
**Online:** <http://icfhr2018.org/tutorials.html>

**Important dates**

    March 1: Tutorial proposal deadline
    March 18: Notification to tutorial organizers

The **16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition ([ICFHR 2018](http://icfhr2018.org))** will take place in
Niagara Falls New York, USA 5-8 August 2018. We are soliciting proposals
for tutorials or short courses to be held at ICFHR 2018. Courses and
tutorials will take place on August 4, the day before the main
conference.

An ICFHR tutorial should provide a comprehensive overview of a specific
topic related to handwriting recognition, and the topic should be of
sufficient relevance and importance to attract significant interest from
the ICFHR community. A good tutorial should be educational rather than
just a cursory survey of techniques. Typical tutorial audiences consist
of graduate students studying computer vision, image processing, or
pattern recognition, but also include researchers and practitioners from
both academia and industry.

We invite proposals for both half-day and full-day courses: however, we
encourage courses to be half-day unless the topic is expected to attract
widespread community attention, or will require the additional time.

Proposals should be submitted by email to <tutorials@icfhr2018.org>.
Please prefix the email subject with the string '\[ICFHR 2018
Tutorial\]'. Proposals should be in PDF format and should include the
following information:

-   Proposed title;
-   Proposers' names, titles, affiliations, emails, and brief bio
    sketches;
-   Preference for half- or full-day event (the latter requires a brief
    justification);
-   Course description with list of topics to be covered, along with a
    brief outline and important details;
-   Expected target audience, in terms of both composition and estimated
    number of attendees;
-   List of citations and/or URLs to relevant publications and/or
    products by the organizers, and to other relevant related work;
-   Description of and/or links to any planned materials or resources to
    be distributed to attendees.

For any questions, please contact the tutorial chairs at
<tutorials@icfhr2018.org>.

**Elisa Barney Smith and Alicia Fornés, ICFHR Workshop and Tutorial
Chairs**  
( <ebarneysmith@boisestate.edu>, <afornes@cvc.uab.es> )

ICFHR 2018 Competitions: Call for Participation
-----------------------------------------------

**Web:** <http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html>  
**Twitter:**
[@IAPR_TC11](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/IAPR-TC11:Reading\_Systems)
@@ICFHR2018 @@ICFHR2018competitions

**Important Dates**

        1 June 2018:  Full papers describing competitions due 
       29 June 2018:  Accepted camera-ready papers due

ICFHR 2018 is hosting seven competitions in the following areas:

-   Handwritten Document Image Binarization Contest
-   Recognition of Historical Arabic Scientific Manuscripts
-   Multi-script Writer Identification
-   Vietnamese Online Handwritten Text Recognition using HANDS-VNOnDB
-   Competition on Automated Text Recognition on a READ Dataset
-   Document Image Analysis Tasks for Southeast Asian Palm Leaf
    Manuscripts
-   Thai Student Signature and Name Components Recognition and
    Verification

Please visit the competitions [web
page](http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html), and contact the
organizers through the available links. If you have any questions,
please contact the Competitions Chairs at <competitions@icfhr2018.org>.

**Harold Mouchère and Nicholas Howe, ICFHR 2018 Competition Chairs**  
( <competitions@icfhr2018.org> )

ICPR: Competitions
==================

ICPR 2018: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification Competition (repost)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

**Web:** <http://chalearnlap.cvc.uab.es/challenge/27/description>

**Important Dates**

    Feb. 20: Competition starts
    Mar. 20: Release of evaluation data
    Apr. 21: Code submission deadline
    Apr. 22: Decryption key release
    Apr. 24: End of competition
    Apr. 27: Deadline for fact sheet submission
    Apr. 30: Paper submisssion deadline
    May  10: Release of verification results
    Aug. 21: Workshop and award ceremony at ICPR

A Competition on <i>Multimedia Information Processing for Personality
and Social Networks Analysis</i> is being held as a part of ICPR 2018 by
members of IAPR TC-12. One task in particular may be of interest to the
TC-11 community:

**Task 2 - HWxPI: Handwritten Texts for Personality Identification.**
The corpus used in this task consists of handwritten Spanish essays from
undergraduates Mexican students. For each essay two files are available:
a manual transcript of the text and a scan image of the original sheet
where the subject hand-wrote the essay. The texts of manual
transcriptions have tags to mark some handwritten phenomena namely:

-   FO (well-written word (misspelling)),
-   D (description (drawing)),
-   IN (insertion of a letter into a word),
-   MD (modification of a word, that is a correction of a word),
-   DL (elimination of a word),
-   NS (when two words were written together; e.g. Iam instead of I am )
    and,
-   SB (syllabification).

Each essay is labelled with five values corresponding to 5 personality
traits in the Big Five Model of Personality. The traits are
Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and
Openness to experience. The range of the value for each trait is 1 to 7.

For additional details, please contact Dr. Dimos Karatzas, who can
direct you to the competition organizers.

**Dimosthenis Karatzas, ICPR Contest Co-Chair**  
(<dimos@cvc.uab.es>)

ICPR 2018 Contest on Fraud Detection: Call for Participation
------------------------------------------------------------

**Web Page:** <http://findit.univ-lr.fr>

**Important Dates**

    Feb.: Training dataset available
    Mar. 30: Registration deadline
    Apr. 5: Evaluation dataset is available
    Apr. 10: Result submission deadline
    Apr. 15: Submitted description of methods
    Aug. 20-24: Conference

We are pleased to announce the Fraud Detection Contest in conjunction
with ICPR 2018.

In recent decades, the explosion of the volume of digital documents
images and development of easy-to-use consumer tools to edit these
images has led to a huge increase in the number of corrupted documents.
The development of many tools and methods to detect modifications has
also increased but their evaluation remains a challenge.

Forensics research is a sensitive topic. Datasets are often private or
unlabeled and most related works are evaluated based on undisclosed
datasets. This restriction has two major consequences: results cannot be
reproduced and no benchmarking can be done between approaches.

This contest was conceived in order to address these drawbacks:

-   First, a public image and text dataset of French shopping receipts
    containing no private information was designed so that it can be
    disclosed and used with no constraints.
-   Second, the contest should finally presents a benchmark on major
    works developed over many years, both for image and text processing
    methods.

The contest is open to all researchers and engineers working on
detection of forgery within documents, images or texts, coming from
different domains (forensics, document analysis, data mining...).

**-- Tasks --**  
**Task 1:** The detection of modified documents. The provided dataset
will contain both genuine and modified documents. The first task aims at
discovering which ones are forged.  
**Task 2:** The spotting of this or these falsification(s) in the
document (many falsifications can occur in one document), with methods
applied to the image or text, or both.

Additional Information and Registration may be found on the competition
web page:

<http://findit.univ-lr.fr>

**Jean-Marc Ogier, Competition Organizer**  
( <jean-marc.ogier@univ-lr.fr> )

IJDAR
=====

New Issue: IJDAR Dec. 2017 (Vol. 20, Issue 4)
---------------------------------------------

**Table of Contents**

Click on the links to go directly to the Springer Link page for each
article.

[A restoration method for distorted comics to improve comic contents
identification.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0291-9)  
Authors:Sang-Hoon Lee, Doyoung Kim, Sagar Jadhav, Sanghoon Lee

[Character segmentation and transcription system for historical Japanese
books with a self-proliferating character image
database.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0292-8)
Authors: Chulapong Panichkriangkra, Liang Li, Takaaki Kaneko, Ryo Akama,
Kozaburo Hachimura

[Recognition of handwritten Lanna Dhamma characters using a set of
optimally designed moment
features.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-017-0290-x)
Authors: Papangkorn Inkeaw, Phasit Charoenkwan, Hui-Ling Huang,
Sanparith Marukatat, Shinn-Ying Ho, Jeerayut Chaijaruwanich

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)
----------------------------------------

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the
publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and
Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a
subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly
50%. For additional details, see the links below:

-   <http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjournal.php>
-   [http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjrnlsub.php](http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjournal.php)

**Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti and Simone Marinai, IJDAR
Editors-in-Chief**  
( <kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp>, <lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu>,
<simone.marinai@unifi.it> )

Careers
=======

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR List) - repost
----------------------------------------------------------------

[IAPR's Industrial Liaison
Committee](http://www.iapr.org/committees/committees.php?id=5&subid=53)
is pleased to announce the opening of its Company Internship Brokerage
List.

The web page lists internship opportunities for students at different
levels of education and specialism. We expect many additional internship
opportunities to be listed here as the community becomes more aware of
the site.

IAPR Company Internship Brokerage List:

<http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/IAPR/INDUSTRIAL>

**Bob Fisher, Chair, IAPR Industrial Liason Committee**  
( <rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk> )

Datasets
========

TC-11 maintains a colletion of datasets that can be found online in the
[TC-11 Datasets
Repository](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php/Datasets).

If you have new datasets (e.g., from competitions) that you wish to
share with the research community, please contact the TC-11 Dataset
Curator (contact information is below).

**Andreas Fischer (TC-11 Dataset Curator)**  
(<andreas.fischer@unifr.ch>)

Contributions and Subscriptions
==================================

**Call for Contributions:** To contribute news items, please send a
short email to the editor, [Richard Zanibbi](mailto:rxzvcs@cs.rit.edu).
Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or 
reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest 
to the TC-11 community. 

**Subscription:** This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR
TC11 mailing list. 

To join the TC-11 mailing list, please click on [this link](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=iapr-tc11&A=1).

To manage your subscription, please visit the [mailing list homepage](https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=IAPR-TC11).

------------------------------------------------------------------------
IAPR TC-11 HOMEPAGE: [http://www.iapr-tc11.org](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)

The IAPR is the International Association for Pattern Recognition.
IAPR's Technical Committee No. 11 (TC-11) includes researchers and
practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more
generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.