# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## April, 2020 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [April 2020 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2020_04) **TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)    **Twitter:** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) ### TABLE OF CONTENTS - Message from the Editor - Dates and Deadlines - Deadlines - Upcoming Conferences and Events - Conferences - ICFHR 2020: Ultimate Call for Papers - ICPR 2020: Call for Papers - Datasets - The Didi dataset: Digital Ink Diagram data - TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* - Careers - Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR) *(repost)* Message from the Editor ======================= I hope this newsletter finds you in good health. In the face of the current worldwide crisis arising from COVID-19, several conferences have changed their program. The *Dates and Deadlines* section contains an updated schedule for the upcoming events related to TC-11. Please check the linked conference and workshop websites for more details. The submission deadline of the [ICFHR 2020](http://icfhr2020.org) conference has been extended. Paper submission is still open a few more days until *April 10*. On the conference website, the organizers state: *"If there is travel restriction in September, the papers of absent authors can be presented online, or even if most authors cannot attend, we ensure that all the accepted papers will be published in the proceedings."* The [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/) conference has been postponed to 10-15 January 2021. A two-round review process is employed, with the first-round paper submission deadline in a few days on *April 15* and the second-round deadline on *July 10*. On a more positive note, a new dataset on digital ink diagram data, called [Didi](https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/didi_dataset), has been made available. For more details, please check the *Datasets* section. Keep safe, **Andreas Fischer, TC11 Communications Officer** ( ) **Join us!** If you are not already a member of the TC11 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 --------- **2020** - **April 10**: Paper submission [ICFHR 2020](http://icfhr2020.org) - **April 15**: Paper submission (first round) [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/) - **July 10**: Paper submission (second round) [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/) Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2020** - [ICPRAI 2020](https://users.encs.concordia.ca/~icprai20). Zhongshan, China (postponed, TBA) - [DAS 2020](http://www.vlrlab.net/das2020/). Beijing, China (postponed, TBA) - [CVPR2020 Workshop on Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era](https://cvpr2020text.wordpress.com). Seattle, Washington (June 15) - [ICFHR 2020](http://www.icfhr2020.org). Dortmund, Germany (September 8-10) **2021 and Later** - [ICPR 2020](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/). Milan, Italy (January 10-15, 2021) - [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org). Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10, 2021) - **ICFHR 2022**. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022) Conferences =========== ICFHR 2020: Ultimate Call for Papers ------------------------------------ **The 17th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition** *September 7-10, 2020 - Dortmund, Germany* Web page: Contact: *The emergence of COVID-19 has caused disruption in every aspect of our professional and personal lives. In addition to care for family members no longer maintaining their regular schedules, many faculty are required to devote extra time to redesign courses to be taught online, and many corporations and universities are implementing new work-from-home measures. Given these disruptions that responding to the global health crisis has caused, the ICFHR organizing committee has decided to extend the submission date until April 10th.* **Important Dates** April 10 Paper Submission (final!) *Note: Both submissions of NEW PAPERS and UPDATES of already submitted ones are welcome until the submission deadline.* Jun 08 Author Notifications Jul 12 Camera-Ready Papers Due July 12 Early-Bird Registration Deadline August 31 Late Registration Deadline Sep 07 ICFHR Tutorials Sep 08-10 ICFHR Main Conference **Keynotes** *Thomas Deselaers* (Google Research, Zurich, Switzerland): Online Handwriting Recognition and Beyond *Alicia Fornés* (Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Recognition of handwritten textual and graphical documents in the deep learning era. *Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra* (EPHE, PSL, Paris, France): Computational Document Analysis: New and Open Questions from a Pragmatic Perspective **Call for Papers** The International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) is the premier scientific venue in the field of handwriting recognition. This conference brings together international experts from academia and industry to share their experiences and to promote research and development in all aspects of handwriting recognition and applications. **Topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:** - Handwriting Recognition - Cursive Script Recognition - Symbol, Equation, Sketch and Drawing Recognition - Word Spotting - Handwritten Document Image Processing - Layout Analysis and Understanding - Language Models in Handwriting Recognition - Web-Based Applications - Handwritten Databases and Digital Libraries - Information Extraction & Retrieval - Form Processing - 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. Paper reviews will be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the ICFHR 2020 web site (). *Proceedings with accepted papers will be published by the IEEE Computer Society's Conference Publishing Service (CPS).* **Gernot A. Fink and Lambert Schomaker, ICFHR 2020 General Chairs** ( ) PDF Version of this Call for Papers: [ICFHR2020-ultimate-CfP.pdf](http://icfhr2020.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ICFHR2020-ultimate-CfP.pdf) ICPR 2020: Call for Papers -------------------------- **The 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition** *September 13-18, 2020 - Milan, Italy* Web page: *Given the COVID-19 situation in Italy and all over the globe, the ICPR2020 Chairs have decided to shift the Conference schedule to 10-15 January 2021 and at the same time employ a two-round review process, with the first-round deadline on April 15, 2020 and the second-round deadline on July 10, 2020.* **Important Dates** *First round review* Apr 15 Paper submission deadline Jun 15 Final decision to authors *Second round review* Jul 10 Paper submission deadline Sep 30 Final decision to authors Oct 15 Camera-ready submission deadline **Call for Papers** **ICPR 2020** is the premier world conference in **Pattern Recognition**. It covers both theoretical issues and applications of the discipline. We solicit original research for publication in the main conference. **Topics** of interest include all aspects of Pattern Recognition, not limited to the following **detailed list**: **Track 1: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis** - statistical, syntactic and structural pattern recognition - classification and clustering - artificial neural networks architectures and models - machine learning:  symbolic learning, deep learning, transfer learning, active and ensemble learning, semi-supervised learning and spectral methods, reinforcement learning and temporal models **Track 2: Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding Biometric systems and forensics applications:** - hard biometrics: face, iris, gait, fingerprint, speech-based recognition - soft biometrics: skin, hair, facial and body measurements, behavior, facial expression-based recognition - multi-biometrics - closed set, open set, open world identity recognition - gesture, action and event recognition and tracking - human computer interaction: human body motion and gesture-based interaction, speech and natural language-based interaction - affective computing - pattern recognition for surveillance and security **Track 3: Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems** - early and low-level vision - physics-based vision and perceptual organization - stereo and multiple view geometry, 3D shape recovery - 2D/3D object detection and recognition - motion, tracking and video analysis - deformable object tracking and registration - object recognition and manipulation - image and video analysis and understanding - vision for autonomous driving - vision for robotics, robot navigation and SLAM **Track 4: Document and Media Analysis** - audio and acoustic processing and analysis - spoken language processing - character and text recognition - handwriting recognition - document understanding - content based image retrieval and data mining - multimedia analysis - visual question and answering - multimedia applications of pattern recognition - media analysis for augmented and virtual reality - multimodal fusion **Track 5: Image and Signal Processing** - sensor array & multichannel signal processing - enhancement, restoration and filtering - segmentation, features and descriptors - coding, compression and super-resolution - automatic speech and speaker recognition - medical image and signal analysis - biological image and signal analysis - volumetric image analysis - brain-computer interfaces **Guidelines for submitting contributions** Given the COVID-19 situation in Italy and all over the globe, the organizers have decided to shift the Conference schedule to 10-15 January 2021. According to this for the first time ICPR will employ a two-round review process similar to journal submissions. New papers can be submitted in either the first or second round. Papers that are submitted in the first round and not accepted can be encouraged to revise and re-submit, thus enabling the authors to address reviewer concerns and improve their work for a second round review. Due to the two-round submission process ICPR2020 will not have a rebuttal option. Authors should consider this if submitting only to the second round. Submissions should be made to the appropriate Conference tracks. All papers will be peer reviewed single-blind. The accepted papers will be published by IEEE and will be available in the IEEExplore.  Submissions should be 6 pages minimum, 8 pages maximum including references (IEEE format). [Guidelines for submission](https://www.micc.unifi.it/icpr2020/index.php/guidelines-for-submission/) and camera ready format are available on the website. **Papers Submission** **Submission Wizard** for the ICPR 2020 is available on PaperCept Conference Management System [HERE](https://iapr.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl) **Contacts** *ICPR-2020 Program Chairs* - Prof. Kim Boyer (Univ. of Albany, USA) - Prof. Nicu Sebe (Univ. of Trento, Italy) - Prof. Brian Lovell (Univ. of Queensland, Australia) - Prof. Marcello Pelillo (Caí Foscari Univ., Italy) - Prof. Rene Vidal (Johns Hopkins Univ., USA) - Prof. Jingyi Yu (Shanghai Tech, China) Datasets ======== The Didi dataset: Digital Ink Diagram data ------------------------------------------ The [Didi dataset](https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/didi_dataset) contains digital ink drawings of diagrams with dynamic drawing information. It aims to foster research in interactive graphical symbolic understanding. The dataset was obtained using a prompted data collection effort. Download on [GitHub](https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/didi_dataset). Documentation available on [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.09303.pdf). **Thomas Deselaers** ( ) TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* ----------------------------------- TC11 maintains a collection of datasets that can be found online in the [TC11 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 use the [online upload form](http://tc11.cvc.uab.es/upload/). For questions and support, please contact the TC11 Dataset Curator (contact information is below). **Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)** ( ) Careers ======= 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, [Andreas Fischer](mailto:andreas.fischer@hefr.ch). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC11 community. **Subscription:** This newsletter is sent to subscribers of the IAPR TC11 mailing list. To join the TC11 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 TC11 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 (TC11) includes researchers and practitioners working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more generally the analysis and recognition of information in documents.