# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## March, 2021 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [March 2021 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2021_03) **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 - Surveys - Survey about TC11 dataset curation - Conferences - Preliminary Call for Papers: 6th Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR 2021) - Call for bids for organising DAS 2022 *(repost)* - Open call for expressions of interest for organising future TC10 or TC11 events *(repost)* - ICDAR 2021 - Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2021 Awards - ICDAR 2021: Workshops *(repost)* - ICDAR 2021 Competition on Multimodal Emotion Recognition on Comics Scenes (EmoRecCom) - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository *(repost)* Message from the Editor ======================= The TC10-11 meeting has taken place online this year. A video of the meeting, during which the strategic plan for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community was discussed, can be found here: . An important cornerstone of the DAR community are its open research datasets. If you have 5 minutes, please considering filling out a short survey on how to improve access to such datasets: Judging by the large number of papers submitted to [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org), the 16th edition of this conference will again serve as a flagship event for allowing experts on DAR from all over the world to meet and exchange their latest research. In order to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field, two awards are traditionally presented at the conference, namely the **IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award** and the **IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award**. An open call for nominations is included in this newsletter, with the deadline set to *April 30*. Note that there are still [ICDAR competitions](https://icdar2021.org/program-2/competitions/) open for participation and [ICDAR satellite workshops](https://icdar2021.org/program-2/workshops/) being organized with paper submission deadlines typically set during *May*. Below you will find a specific call for participating in the competition on [Multimodal Emotion Recognition on Comics Scenes (EmoRecCom)](https://emoreccom.univ-lr.fr). Other conferences later this year, which consider DAR topics, include the 20th Conference of the International Graphonomics Society [IGS 2021](https://www.igs2021.ulpgc.es) and the 6th Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition [ACPR 2021](http://www.acpr2021.org/). A preliminary call for papers for ACPR 2021 is provided in this newsletter. Finally, if you are interested in organizing the **15th International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2022)**, please consider submitting a bid to the TC11 chair and vice-chair until *March 31*. More details in the call for bids below. **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 --------- **2021** - **March 31**: Bids for organizing DAS 2022 - **March 31**: Survey about [IAPR TC11 dataset curation](https://bit.ly/3mHPht2) - **April 30**: Award nominations [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org) - **May 15**: Paper submission [IGS 2021](https://www.igs2021.ulpgc.es) - **June 10**: Paper submission [ACPR 2021](http://www.acpr2021.org) Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2021** - [ICDAR 2021](https://icdar2021.org). Lausanne, Switzerland (September 5-10) - [IGS 2021](https://www.igs2021.ulpgc.es). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (September 13-15) - [ACPR 2021](http://www.acpr2021.org). Jeju Island, Korea (November 9-12) **2022 and Later** - **ICFHR 2022**. Hyderabad, India (December, 2022) Surveys ======= Survey about TC11 dataset curation ---------------------------------- **How can we help you better? [Let us know!](https://bit.ly/3mHPht2)** Dear colleagues, As you may already know, TC11 offers an [online platform](http://datasets.iapr-tc11.org/) where researchers can find and share datasets. The TC11 is looking forward to assessing the visibility and efficiency of this platform, as well as identifying potential evolutions. Could you please take **5 minutes** to complete the following anonymous survey? **Survey about TC11 dataset curation:** You feedback will be much appreciated and will help us provide useful tools for you. We also encourage you to share this survey. This poll will remain open until **March 31, 2021**. Thank you for your help. **Joseph Chazalon (TC11 Dataset Curator)** ( ) Conferences =========== Preliminary Call for Papers: 6th Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR 2021) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9-12 November 2021, ICC Jeju, South Korea [www.acpr2021.org](http://www.acpr2021.org) **Important Dates and Deadlines** Submission Site Open: 10 April 2021 Submission Deadline: 10 June 2021 Notification to Authors: 10 August 2021 Camera-ready Submission: 10 September 2021 Conference Dates: 09-12 November 2021 The 6th Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR2021) is taking place in Jeju Island, South Korea from November 9th to November 12th, 2021. The conference will be held in a hybrid format allowing for both on-site or virtual participation (pending the COVID19 travel situation, it may switch to a virtual-only format). ACPR 2021 solicits high-quality original research for publication in its main conference and co-located workshops. All accepted papers will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and indexed by ISI, Scopus, EI, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc. Full papers must be accompanied by an abstract summarizing the contribution the paper makes to the field. Full papers are limited to 14 pages in LNCS format. All papers will be peer reviewed single-blind. Paper templates will be provided and the submission site will be open soon. **Topics of interest** include all aspects of pattern recognition: **Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning** - Artificial neural networks - Dimensionality reduction - Classification and clustering - Support vector machines and kernel methods - Structural pattern recognition - Deep learning and reinforcement learning - Transfer learning **Media Processing and Interaction** - Surveillance and security - Mixed and augmented reality - Human computer interaction - Handwriting recognition - Document understanding - Biometric systems - Multimedia analysis and retrieval **Computer Vision and Robot Vision** - Biologically motivated vision - Physics-based vision - Computational photography - 3D vision - Motion analysis and tracking - Object detection and recognition - Scene understanding **Signal Processing** - Signal and image processing - Audio and acoustic processing and analysis - Spoken language processing - Texture and color analysis - Enhancement and restoration - Biomedical signal analysis - Brain-computer interface If you have any questions, please contact: Call for bids for organising DAS 2022 *(repost)* ------------------------------------------------ Following the successful organisation of the 14th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, hosted virtually from Wuhan (China) last July, we are now soliciting proposals for organising and hosting DAS 2022. The DAS workshop has become one of the signature events for TC11. DAS 2022 will build on the tradition established by past DAS workshops held in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1994), Malvern, PA (1996), Nagano, Japan (1998), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2000), Princeton, NJ (2002), Florence, Italy (2004), Nelson, New Zealand (2006), Nara, Japan (2008), Boston, MA (2010), and Gold Coast, Australia (2012), Tours-Loire Valley, France (2014), Santorini, Greece (2016), Vienna, Austria (2018), and Wuhan, China (2020). Individuals and groups who are interested in Document Analysis Systems are invited to submit proposals for organizing and hosting DAS 2022. The event should preferably take place in late summer/fall but is not limited to this period. The submission deadline is **March 31st, 2021**. Proposals should be submitted to the TC11 chair (Dimosthenis Karatzas) and vice-chair (Gernot Fink). If you have a potential interest in preparing a proposal, please let us know in advance. Such an expression of interest is not a commitment to make a formal proposal nor an official bid, but it would help us monitor the bid preparation activity and will give us a chance to help with the preparation of the bids. Similarly, if you need further information concerning DAS, please feel free to contact us. The final selection among competing proposals will be made short after the deadline by the DAS Steering Committee, which is composed of all those who have themselves organized or contributed substantially to past DAS workshops. **Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC11 Chair (dimos\@cvc.uab.es)** **Dr Gernot Fink, TC11 Vice-Chair (gernot.fink\@cs.tu-dortmund.de)** Open call for expressions of interest for organising future TC10 or TC11 events *(repost)* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Due to the current pandemic situation, and understanding the difficulties in putting together a complete bid under the current circumstances, the TC10 and TC11 teams have opted not to open specific calls for organising any future events planned for after 2023. Nevertheless, we would like to probe the community, and invite our colleagues to start thinking about whether they would like to potentially organise a future TC10 or TC11 event (e.g. conference, workshop, summer school). We will be gathering expressions of interest for a few months. These are not meant to be full proposals, but rather an informal message to the TC10/TC11 chair, indicating a possible interest to organise one of the future events. If you think you can take on the organisation of such a future event, please send us a quick message, indicating if possible where, when and which event you would be interested in organising. **Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, TC11 Chair (dimos\@cvc.uab.es)** **Dr Alicia Fornes, TC10 Chair (afornes\@cvc.uab.es)** ICDAR 2021 ========== Call for Nominations for ICDAR 2021 Awards ------------------------------------------ **Important Dates** Nominations Due: April 30, 2021 The IAPR/ICDAR Award Program is an established program designed to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas: - Research - Training of students - Research/Industry interaction - Service to the community Every two years, two awards categories are presented. Namely, the **IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award** (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made), and the **IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award**. Each award will consist of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievements award will be invited to give the opening keynote speech at the ICDAR 2021 conference, introduced by the recipient from the previous conference. Nominations are invited for the ICDAR 2021 Awards in both categories. The nomination pack should include the following: 1. A nominating letter (1 page) including a brief citation to be included in the certificate. 2. Supporting letters (1 page each) from 3 active researchers from at least 3 different countries. A nomination is usually put forward by a researcher (preferably from a different institution than the nominee) who is knowledgeable of the scientific achievements of the nominee, and who organizes letters of support. The submission procedure is strictly confidential, and self-nominations are not allowed. Please send nominations packs electronically to the TC10 and TC11 chairs: **Dimosthenis Karatzas ** and **Alicia Fornes **. The deadline for receiving nominations is April 30, 2021 but early submissions are strongly encouraged. ICDAR 2021: Workshops *(repost)* -------------------------------- During the pre-conference from September 5-7, 2021, several workshops related to document analysis and recognition will be held in conjunction with the ICDAR 2021 main conference. Accepted workshops: - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2021, 14th edition)](https://grec2021.univ-lr.fr/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2021, 9th edition)](https://cbdar2021.univ-lr.fr/) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP 2021, 6th edition)](http://sbb.berlin/hip2021) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Arabic and Derived Script Analysis and Recognition (ASAR 2021, 4th edition)](https://asar2021.wixsite.com/home) - ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (IWCDF 2021, 3rd edition) - ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Future of Document Analysis and Recognition (FDAR 2021, 3rd edition) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Human-Document Interaction (HDI 2021, 3rd edition)](https://grce.labri.fr/HDI/index.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning (WML 2021, 3rd edition)](https://www.isical.ac.in/~cvpr/ICDARWML21/) - ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis (ICDAR-OST 2021, 3rd edition) - ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Industrial Applications of Document Analysis and Recognition (WIADAR 2021, 2nd edition) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Computational Paleography (1st edition)](https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/iwcp2021.html) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Document Image and Language (WDIL 2021, 1st edition)](https://dil2021.github.io/index.html) - ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA 2021, 1st edition) - [ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Graph Representation Learning for Scanned Document Analysis (GLESDO 2021, 1st edition)](https://www.glesdo-icdar2021.ml/) For any question, please contact the **Workshop Chairs, Elisa Barney Smith and Umapada Pal**: ICDAR 2021 Competition on Multimodal Emotion Recognition on Comics Scenes (EmoRecCom) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear all, You are cordially invited to join the competition on Multimodal Emotion Recognition on Comics Scenes. In this competition, we would like to tackle a problem of comic scene analysis: the emotion recognition of comic scenes. The competition task aims at extracting the emotions of comic characters in comic scenes. The emotions of comic characters are described by the Visual information, the Text in speech Balloons or Captions and the Onomatopoeia (Comic drawings of words that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes). The task hence is a multi-modal analysis task which can take advantages from both fields: computer vision and natural language processing which are two of the main interests of the ICDAR/ML/CV community. Website: CodaLab: **Important dates** - Registration open (click [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeF6KhG9YAXuXS42pnAfKXdCFjM9KiSKJgGugAxbvSykBpw_A/viewform)): **December 01, 2020** - CodaLab, warm-up data and evaluation tools available: **December 16, 2021** - Training dataset and evaluation tools available: **January 10, 2021** - Registration deadline: **January 30, 2021** - Test dataset available: **March 24, 2021** - Result submission deadline: **March 31, 2021 (midnight UTC)** - Result notification: **April 06, 2021** - Result publication at ICDAR conference: **September 5-10, 2021** **Organizers** Nhu-Van NGUYEN (La Rochelle University, France) Xuan-Son VU (Umeå University, Sweden) Christophe RIGAUD (La Rochelle University, France) Lili JIANG (Umeå University, Sweden) Jean-Christophe BURIE (La Rochelle University, France) Datasets ======== 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)** ( ) 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.