# IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems) Newsletter ## February, 2026 **Online, phone-friendly version:** [February 2026 Newsletter](http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=IAPR_TC11_Newsletter_2026_02) **TC-11:** [TC-11 Homepage](http://www.iapr-tc11.org)    **X (Twitter):** [iapr_tc11](https://twitter.com/iapr_tc11) ### TABLE OF CONTENTS - Message from the Editor - Dates and Deadlines - Deadlines - Upcoming Conferences and Events - Open Call for Organizing DAR Events *(repost)* - Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2026) *(repost)* - Miscellaneous News - IGS 2025 Proceedings - ICPR 2026 Workshops related to DAR - ICPR 2026 Tutorials - Scientific Competition News *(repost)* - ICDAR 2026 Competitions - ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains (DocVQA2026) - Datasets - TC11 Datasets Repository Message from the Editor ======================= Dear TC11 members, This issue contains various news on workshops, competitions, proceedings that may be of interest to our readers. I would like once again to encourage junior members of our DAR community to register to participate in the 6th edition of the summer school on document analysis, focusing this year on next generation document understanding. Enjoy reading! **Nibal Nayef, TC11 Communication 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 X (Twitter) (iapr\_tc11):** Dates and Deadlines =================== Deadlines --------- **2026** - **Feb 27** ICDAR full papers submission (today - hard deadline) - **Feb 28** ICPR Tutorial proposals due - **Mar 20** SSDA registration deadline Upcoming Conferences and Events ------------------------------- **2026** - [SSDA 2026](https://ssdag.cvc.uab.es/). Vall de Núria, Catalonia (May 25-29, 2026) - [ICPRAI 2026](https://icprai2026.com/). Montréal, Québec, Canada (June 15-18, 2026) - [ICPR 2026](https://icpr2026.org/index.html). Lyon, France (August 17-22, 2026) - [ICDAR 2026](https://icdar2026.org/). Vienna, Austria (August 30 - September 4, 2026) Open Call for Organizing DAR Events *(repost)* ============================================== The IAPR technical committees on graphics recognition (TC10) and reading systems (TC11) are regularly organizing scientific events for the Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) community, including the ICDAR flagship conference. In addition to specific calls for bids to host one of the events, we encourage teams to announce their interest in organizing one of the following events: - **ICDAR**: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (annually; next possibility in **2029**) - **DAS**: International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (satellite event of ICDAR in even years; next possibility in **2026**) - **HIP**: International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (satellite event of ICDAR; next possibility in **2026**) - **GREC**: International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (satellite event of ICDAR in odd years; next possibility in **2027**) - **SSDA**: Summer School on Document Analysis (next possibility in **2027**) You may find the details of each specific call in the previous or future issues of this newsletter or in the respective websites of each event. Anyone interested in hosting one of these events is invited to announce their interest via email to and , in order to receive feedback and support for preparing a proposal. **KC Santosh (Chair, TC10)** **Andreas Fischer (Chair, TC11)** Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA 2026) *(repost)* ========================================================= This is a call for participation in the 6th edition of the IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA). This year's SSDA is focused on next-generation Document Understanding, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and structured knowledge representation. The program combines foundational lectures to hands-on practice sessions and solving real-world industry challenges in collaborative teams. ***Five days immersed in document analysis in an extraordinary mountain valley!*** **Location:** Vall de Núria, Catalonia *(Transport from Barcelona included in registration fee)* **Key dates:** - Pre-registration deadline: March 20 - Acceptance notification: March 28 - **Summer School: May 25--29, 2026** For more information, and pre-registration: https://ssdag.cvc.uab.es/ Miscellaneous News ================== IGS 2025 Proceedings -------------------- The proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS): "Investigating Human Movements; Handwriting and Beyond" are available for free download at: https://pum.umontreal.ca/catalogue/proceedings\_igs\_2025 The TC11 readers may find some relations to DAR research topics. These proceedings present the extended abstracts of all the papers and posters that were presented during the IGS 2025 conference held at Polytechnique Montréal on June 2-5, 2025. ICPR 2026 Workshops related to DAR ---------------------------------- Here is a few selected [ICPR 2026 workshops](https://icpr2026.org/workshops.html) that may be interesting to the TC11 readers: **Workshop on Textual Information Processing & Synthesis in the Wild (TIPS 2026)** Website: https://tips2026.midasoc.org/ This workshop focuses on the automated understanding and interpretation of textual and visual patterns in complex document and scene contexts in images and videos. Research papers on different areas of document image and video analysis, document image editing, font analysis and synthesis, natural language processing, text summarization etc are welcome for this workshop. Paper submission: May 05 2026 (All deadlines are strict at 23:59 AOE) **Trustworthy Document Understanding: Privacy, Unlearning, Robustness, and Explainability (TrustDoc)** Website: https://sites.google.com/view/trustdoc/home Pattern recognition is the foundation of modern document image understanding, supporting progress in document classification, handwritten text recognition, DocVQA, and multimodal modeling of text, layout, and visual structure. As these systems are increasingly deployed in real-world, high-stakes environments, they must meet new expectations for trust, safety, and regulatory compliance. Current document image models are required to support machine unlearning, to resist imperceptible document forgeries and membership inference attacks, to preserve the privacy of sensitive handwritten or scanned data, and to offer transparent and interpretable decisions. These demands raise fundamental research questions on how models memorise and forget document-specific features, how handwritten text recognition can remain robust under regime changes, and how multimodal document representations should be evaluated from ethical and trustworthiness perspectives. Paper submission: May 16 2026 (CET) **XAIE4 : 4th workshop on Explainable and Ethical AI** Website: https://xaie4.sciencesconf.org/ The problems related to Ethical AI are complex and broad and encompass not only technical issues but also legal, political and ethical ones. One of the key component of Ethical AI systems is explainability or transparency, but other issues like detecting bias, ability to control the outcomes, ability to objectively audit AI systems for ethics are also critical for successful applications and adoption of AI in society. Many workshops in this field are held at top conferences, and we believe ICPR has to address this topic broadly and focus on its technical aspects. Our proposed workshop aims to address technical aspects of explainable and ethical AI in general, and include related applications and case studies with the aim to address this very important problems from a broad technical perspective. Paper submission: May 01 2026 **Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding (MANPU)** *Website is not available yet.* MANPU deals with research activities about comics. The large variability of comic books and the complexity of their contents make comics analysis a kind of advanced problem of document image understanding or, more generally, knowledge-based scene recognition. ICPR 2026 Tutorials ------------------- ***Deadline tomorrow 28 Feb. 2026*** This is a reminder to submit your proposals for tutorials in conjunction with the 28th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which will be held at Lyon, France, during August 17-21, 2026. The full call is available at: https://icpr2026.org/callTutorials.html Scientific Competition News *(repost)* -------------------------------------- ### ICDAR 2026 Competitions ICDAR competitions are now online and open for participation. Please find the list of competitions and their details here: https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/ ### ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains (DocVQA2026) Building on the successful DocVQA series of competitions, this new competition aims to test the multi-modal reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models on 8 different document domains: business reports, scientific papers, slides, scientific posters, maps, comics, infographics, and engineering drawings. **Important Dates:** - January 30, 2026: Validation set is published - March 3, 2026: Test set available on the evaluation server - April 3, 2026: Competition results deadline - April 17, 2026: Competition report submission due - June 22, 2026: Competition winners announced For more information and to participate: https://www.docvqa.org/challenges/2026 Datasets ======== TC11 Datasets Repository ------------------------ **Where to share datasets** Did you know it? We have two official places for datasets: - Our historical platform for storage and listing: http://datasets.iapr-tc11.org - A Zenodo community (if you choose to submit your datasets there): https://zenodo.org/communities/iapr-tc11 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, [Nibal Nayef](mailto:n.nayef@gmail.com). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements or reports, job 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.