# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## November, 2018 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [November 2018 Newsletter]( ) *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):** Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- **2018** - **Dec. 10:** 2019 TC10/11 Summer School on Document Analysis proposals due **2019** - **Feb. 15:** Paper submission deadline for [ICDAR 2019](http://www.icdar2019.org). ([Call for Papers](http://icdar2019.org/call-for-papers)) - **Feb. 15 - Mar. 31**: Submissions for the [Pattern Recognition Special Issue on Scene Text Reading](https://www.journals.elsevier.com/pattern-recognition/call-for-papers/scene-text-reading-and-its-applications-stra) Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2018** - [IWRR 2018](http://www.cvc.uab.es/iwrr2018/?c=home). Perth, Australia (Dec. 2, 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) - **DAS 2020.** Wuhan, China (May 17-20, 2020) - **ICFHR 2022**. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022) Call for Proposals: TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2019) ============================================================================ **Important Dates:** Friday Dec. 10, 2018 Proposal Submission Deadline **Submit Proposals via Email to:** - Gernot A. Fink (TC11 Representative), , and - Jean-Christophe Burie (TC10 Representative), Part of the mission of IAPR TC11 and TC10 is to promote high quality educational activities related to Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. Responding to this need, TC10 and TC11 have established a series of summer schools. After the successful organization of summer schools in Jaipur, India, and La Rochelle, France, we are now are soliciting proposals for the organisation of the third "IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis" (SSDA) in 2019. The *"IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis"* is intended to become the primary educational activity of IAPR TC11 (Reading Systems) and TC10 (Graphics Recognition). The School is meant to be a training activity where participants are exposed to the latest trends and techniques of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The aim of the School is to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in selected topics of Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition. The School should aim to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and Ph.D. students in the field. Individuals and groups who are interested in Reading Systems and Graphics Recognition are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting the 2019 IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. As the previous summer schools were organized in Asia and Europe, organizing teams from the Americas are encouraged to submit a bid in order to facilitate the envisioned rotational scheme of the IAPR TC10 / TC11 Summer School. In order to fully plan their bid, it is expected that proposers familiarise themselves with the guidelines for organising the School first. The Guidelines can be found at the TC11 Web site: The submission of a bid implies full agreement with the rules and procedures for organising the School. Especially, this means that organizers will apply for IAPR support and that the event will use the series title "IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis" with an optional sub-title denoting a special focus of the respective event. **The deadline for submitting written proposals is: Friday, December 10, 2018.** Please consider submitting a proposal for this increasingly important event for the TC10/TC11 community. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact the TC11 and TC10 SSDA representatives (emails above) ICDAR: Call for Papers ====================== The [15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition]() will be held in Sydney, Australia from September 20-25, 2019. ICDAR is the premier international gathering for researchers, scientist and practitioners in the document analysis community. **Important Dates** Feb 15, 2019 Paper Submission Deadline May 15, 2019 Author Notification Jun 15, 2019 Camera-Ready Papers Due ICDAR was established nearly three decades ago, and is endorsed by IAPR-TC 10/11. The 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019) is being organised by University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia and will be held at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Sydney. The conference General Chairs are Michael Blumenstein and Umapada Pal. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society's Conference Publishing Services (CPS) and included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. **Topics of Interest include, but not limited to:** - Document Image Processing - Physical and logical layout analysis - Character and text recognition - Pen‐based document analysis - Historical document analysis - Document analysis systems - Symbol and graphics recognition - Document forensics - Human document interaction - Scene text detection and recognition - Document retrieval - Signature verification and writer identification - Multimedia documents - Performance evaluation - Machine learning for document analysis - Applications of document analysis - Cognitive issues of documents - Semantic information extraction from documents - Document summarization classification and translation - Document simulation and synthesis **Submission and Review** ICDAR 2019 will follow a double blind review process. Authors should not include their names and affiliations anywhere in the manuscript. Authors should also ensure that their identity is not revealed indirectly by citing their previous work in the third person, and omitting including acknowledgements until the camera-ready version. **Paper format and length** Papers accepted for the conference will be allocated 6 pages in the proceedings, with the option of purchasing up to 2 extra pages for AUD 100 per page. This will have to be paid after paper acceptance and at the time of registration. The length of the submitted manuscript should match that intended for final publication. Therefore, if you are unwilling or unable to pay the extra charge you should limit your paper to 6 pages. Otherwise the page limit is 8 pages. **Cheng-Lin Liu, Andreas Dengel, and Rafael Lins, ICDAR 2019 Program Chairs** ( , , ) Journals ======== Pattern Recognition Special Issue on Scene Text Reading and its Applications (STRA) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Important Dates:** Feb 15 - Mar 31, 2019 Paper Submission Period Text in scenes is an important source of information, since it conveys high-level semantics and is almost seen everywhere. These unique traits make scene text reading, involving automated detection and recognition of texts in scene images and videos, a very active research topic in the communities of computer vision, pattern recognition, and multimedia. Recently, these communities have observed a significant surge of research interests and efforts regarding the topic of Scene Text Reading, which is evidenced by the huge number of participants and submissions of ICDAR competitions as well as papers published on top journals and conferences. Meanwhile, various real-world applications, such as product search, augmented reality, video indexing and autonomous driving, have formed strong demands for technique and systems that can effectively and efficiently extract and understand textual information in scene images and videos. This special issue will feature original research papers related to the theories, ideas, algorithms and systems for Scene Text Reading, together with applications to real-world problems. **The topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:** - Basic theories and representations regarding text in natural scenes - Scene text detection methods for scene images - Scene text recognition methods for scene images - End-to-end reading systems for scene images - Text detection and recognition in born-digital images - Text detection, recognition and tracking in videos - Script identification in the wild - Text information mining from web images and videos - Quality assessment and text image/video restoration methods - Benchmark datasets and performance evaluation methods - Applications related to scene text understanding - Survey papers on scene text understanding **Guest Editors:** - Dr. Xiang Bai () Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China - Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas () Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain - Dr. Shijian Lu () Nanyang Technological University, Singapore - Dr. C. V. Jawahar () IIIT Hyderabad, India IJDAR: Latest Issue (Vol. 21, Issue 4) *(repost)* ------------------------------------------------- The latest issue of IJDAR was released in mid-October. Click on the links below to go directly to the Springer Link page for each article. **Table of Contents** 1. [Building efficient CNN architecture for offline handwritten Chinese character recognition.](http://alerts.springer.com/re?l=D0In6bp45I6hfgfd5Ij) *Zhiyuan Li, Nanjun Teng, Min Jin & Huaxiang Lu* 2. [A comprehensive study of hybrid neural network hidden Markov model for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition.](http://alerts.springer.com/re?l=D0In6bp45I6hfgfd5Im) *Zi-Rui Wang, Jun Du, Wen-Chao Wang, Jian-Fang Zhai & Jin-Shui Hu* 3. [Augmented incremental recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions.](http://alerts.springer.com/re?l=D0In6bp45I6hfgfd5Ip) *Khanh Minh Phan, Anh Duc Le, Bipin Indurkhya & Masaki Nakagawa* 4. [A combined strategy of analysis for the localization of heterogeneous form fields in ancient pre-printed records.](http://alerts.springer.com/re?l=D0In6bp45I6hfgfd5Is) *Aurélie Lemaitre, Jean Camillerapp, Cérès Carton & Bertrand Coüasnon* 5. [KERTAS: dataset for automatic dating of ancient Arabic manuscripts.](http://alerts.springer.com/re?l=D0In6bp45I6hfgfd5Iv) *Kalthoum Adam, Asim Baig, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Ahmed Bouridane & Sherine El-Menshawy* MDPI Journal of Imaging: Special Issue on Document Image Processing *(repost)* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The MDPI Journal of Imaging Special Issue on Document Image Processing has been released! The Guest editors are Ergina Kavallieratou and Laurence Likforman-Sulem. All articles are open access, and may be downloaded from the link below: **Table of Contents** 1. **Editorial: Document Image Processing** *(L. Likforman Sulem and E. Kavallieratou)* 2. **Non-Local Sparse Image Inpainting for Document Bleed-Through Removal** *(Muhammad Hanif, Anna Tonazzini, Pasquale Savino and Emanuele Salerno)* 3. **A New Binarization Algorithm for Historical Documents** *(Marcos Almeida, Rafael Dueire Lins, Rodrigo Bernardino, Darlisson Jesus and Bruno Lima)* 4. **Slant Removal Technique for Historical Document Images** *(Ergina Kavallieratou, Laurence Likforman-Sulem and Nikos Vasilopoulos)* 5. **Text/Non-Text Separation from Handwritten Document Images Using LBP Based Features: An Empirical Study** *(Sourav Ghosh, Dibyadwati Lahiri, Showmik Bhowmik, Ergina Kavallieratou and Ram Sarkar)* 6. **A Holistic Technique for an Arabic OCR System** *(Farhan M. A. Nashwan, Mohsen A. A. Rashwan, Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy, Sherif M. Abdou and Abdullah M. Moussa)* 7. **Efficient Query Specific DTW Distance for Document Retrieval with Unlimited Vocabulary** *(Gattigorla Nagendar, Viresh Ranjan, Gaurav Harit and C. V. Jawahar)* 8. **Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition Using Layer-Wise Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Adaptive Gradient Methods** *(Mahesh Jangid and Sumit Srivastava)* 9. **Benchmarking of Document Image Analysis Tasks for Palm Leaf Manuscripts from Southeast Asia** *(Made Windu Antara Kesiman, Dona Valy, Jean-Christophe Burie, Erick Paulus, Mira Suryani, Setiawan Hadi, Michel Verleysen, Sophea Chhun and Jean-Marc Ogier)* 10. **Transcription of Spanish Historical Handwritten Documents with Deep Neural Networks** *(Emilio Granell, Edgard Chammas, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Carlos-D. Martínez-Hinarejos, Chafic Mokbel and Bogdan-Ionuţ Cîrste)* 11. **A Study of Different Classifier Combination Approaches for Handwritten Indic Script Recognition** *(Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Pawan Kumar Singh, Ram Sarkar and Mita Nasipuri)* 12. **DocCreator: A New Software for Creating Synthetic Ground-Truthed Document Images** *(Nicholas Journet, Muriel Visani, Boris Mansencal, Kieu Van-Cuong and Antoine Billy)* 13. **Open Datasets and Tools for Arabic Text Detection and Recognition in News Video Frames** *(Oussama Zayene, Sameh Masmoudi Touj, Jean Hennebert, Rolf Ingold and Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara)* **Ergina Kavallieratou, Guest Editor, MDPI Special Issue on Document Image Processing** ( ) 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/intjrnlsub.php](http://www.iapr.org/publications/intjournal.php) **Koichi Kise, Daniel Lopresti and Simone Marinai, IJDAR Editors-in-Chief** ( , , ) Datasets *(repost)* =================== 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)** () Careers ======= Faculty Positions at the University of Michigan (USA) *(repost)* ---------------------------------------------------------------- Come work with us! **The University of Michigan School of Information is hiring tenure-track faculty in multiple areas this year.** We also have an outstanding Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship program that can serve as a fast track to assistant professor. Please see the links below - for questions about any of these positions, please contact the chair of the faculty search committee, Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson (). - Tenure-track faculty positions in data science - Tenure-track faculty positions in digital curation and archival studies - Tenure-track faculty position in social media - U-M Presidential Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) **General UMSI faculty job openings:** The University generally seeks applicants whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education. The program is particularly interested in scholars with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their non-traditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education. The mission of the School of Information is to create and share knowledge to help people use information -- with technology -- to build a better world. A successful candidate will be committed to, and will directly contribute to our goal of being the best research and teaching institution for the understanding and design of information and its technologies in service of people and society. The School is home to vibrant research and teaching programs, with 50 FTE professors, and over 800 students. We offer four degrees: a Ph.D.; a Master of Science in Information; a Master of Health Informatics; and a Bachelor of Science in Information. In the fall of 2019 we expect to launch a new online degree: Master of Applied Data Science. Founded in 1817, the University of Michigan has a long and distinguished history as one of the first public universities in the nation. It is one of only two public institutions consistently ranked among the nation's top ten universities. The University has one of the largest health care complexes in the world and one of the best library systems in the United States. With more than \1 billion in research expenditures annually, the University has the second largest research expenditure among all universities in the nation. The University has an annual general fund budget of more than \2.1 billion and an endowment valued at more than \10.9 billion. **U-M EEO/AA Statement:** The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Chair of the Faculty Search Committee** ( ) Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR - *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: **Bob Fisher, Chair, IAPR Industrial Liason Committee** ( ) 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.