ICDAR

ICDAR is the main event of the technical committees TC-10 and TC-11 within the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

The volume and quality of technical material submitted to the conference confirm that Document Analysis and Recognition is an active community, both from the scientific and industrial sides, and reinforce ICDAR’s status as one of the flagship Pattern Recognition conferences. ICDAR2009 had a varied and high quality technical program, managed by A. Antonacopoulos, M. Cheriet, and U. Pal. We received more than 430 submissions, a record in the history of the conference. Of these, about 20% were accepted as oral and 44% as poster presentations. About 16% of accepted papers had at least one author from a company, which shows that our research has a strong industrial impact, and the field is rich in industry-academia pathways. The most represented topics were handwriting recognition, character recognition, and DIA systems and applications. ICDAR had 378 registered participants coming from 31 countries. Of these, 255 were full registrants, and 123 were students. The proceedings of ICDAR2009 were edited by IEEE and are publicly available at the conference web site.

In addition to the regular sessions, five prestigious keynotes have been presented by H. Bunke, IAPR Fellow (Graph-based Representations in Document Analysis), A. Conteh (Mass Digitisation in Digital Libraries: The Experience of the British Library), A. Dengel, IAPR Fellow (Ontology-Based Document Understanding on the Semantic Desktop), A. Isaev (Enterprise Approach to OCR Technology Development Speaker), and G. Lorette (Ten editions of ICDAR: Overview and Outlook).

Besides the main conference, ICDAR2009 included four satellite workshops, namely CBDAR2009 (chairs: T. Breuel and S. Uchida; 51 participants); MOCR2009 (chairs: V. Govindaraju, IAPR Fellow, and P. Natarajan; 27 participants), AND2009 (chair: D. Lopresti; 29 participants) and GREC2009 (chair: J. M. Ogier; 62 participants, see related article). The last one took place in La Rochelle (France). Four tutorials were organized the day before the main conference. Interactive Multimodal Transcription of Handwritten Text Images (E. Vidal, A. Tosselli; 13 participants), Forensic Document Examiners Approach To Handwriting Comparisons / Identification (S. Ibrahim, E. van den Heuvel; 9 participants), Digital Libraries and Historical Document Processing (A. Antonacopoulos, S. Marinai; 20 participants), Pattern Recognition Systems – Conception, Evaluation and Improvement (V. Märgner, H. El Abed; 20 participants). The scientific program was also completed with nine competitions. As in ICDAR2007 in Curitiba (Brazil), to offer an increased visibility to the presentation of the competition reports, the session was designed as a plenary session just before the closing session.

We wish to congratulate Prof. Horst Bunke who received the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and services to the community. We also wish to congratulate Dr. Katrin Franke who received the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award for her outstanding contributions to handwriting analysis and computational forensics.

Three paper award categories were presented. The Best Paper Award, sponsored by Itesoft, was presented to X. Peng, S. Setlur, V. Govindaraju, R. Sitaram and K. Bhuvanagiri for the paper Markov Random Field Based Text Identification from Annotated Machine Printed Documents. The Best Student Paper Award, sponsored by IBM, was presented to P. Pratim Roy, U. Pal, J. Lladós and M. Delalandre for the paper Multi-Oriented and Multi-Sized Touching Character Segmentation using Dynamic Programming. The Best Industry Related Paper Award, selected by the IAPR Industrial Liaison Committee was presented to Y. Wang and Q. Huo for the paper Design Compact Recognizers of Handwritten Chinese Characters Using Precision Constrained Gaussian Models, Minimum Classification Error Training and Parameter Compression. On behalf the ICDAR2009 organizing committee we would like to congratulate the awardees for their excellent contributions.

Last but not least, ICDAR2009 had an exciting social program. The welcome reception was held in the UAB campus, enjoying traditional Catalan food and folklore performances. The Conference banquet took place in Sala Maremagnum, in Barcelona Old Harbour, with a final performance of Rumba Catalana. Before the dinner, participants went on a boat trip around the Port Vell (Old Harbour) enjoying the beautiful views of the coast of Barcelona.

The next edition, ICDAR2011, will take place in Beijing (China) in July 2011. We wish the organizers a lot of success with the organization!

Conference Report: ICDAR 2009

Report prepared by the Conference Chairs