DAS2012

The IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS) is one of the most popular meetings in the area of Document Analysis and is held every alternate year. DAS is a single-track, peer-reviewed, 100% participation workshop that brings together industrialists and academics as well as practitioners and theoreticians from numerous related disciplines involved in document analysis systems research and provides an opportunity for interactions among them.

The 2012 iteration of DAS was held on the beautiful Gold Coast in Australia and was organised by the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS) at Griffith University, in conjunction with the Science, Environment, Engineering, and Technology Group (SEET) at Griffith. The Gold Coast City Council and Gold Coast Tourism also extended their support in organising the workshop to a great extent. DAS 2012 was also sponsored by the IAPR, Griffith University, BusinessGC, and Hitachi Japan. The DAS 2012 organisers are very grateful to the workshop sponsors and supporters for their generous assistance. Details about DAS 2012 can be obtained at: www.ict.griffith.edu.au/das2012/.

DAS 2012 attracted a record number of document analysis researchers from all over the world. In fact, 131 paper submissions were received from researchers representing 32 countries, which is indicative of the popularity of DAS, especially at the Gold Coast. The Program Committee Chairs invited 126 international referees to review the papers received. Finally, 91 papers were accepted for publication by the IEEE Conference Publishing Services (CPS). Out of the 91 papers accepted, 36 were selected for oral presentation, and 55 for poster presentation, along with 13 short papers and 2 demo sessions. These accepted papers covered diverse areas of pre-processing, feature extraction, segmentation, recognition, signature verification, text classification, image retrieval techniques, video document processing, document image decoding, graphical document processing, performance evaluation, historical and handwritten documents, and various other systems and applications for document analysis. The final program consisted of seven oral sessions, two poster sessions, and one discussion session.

In addition, the keynote lecture was delivered by the distinguished speaker, Dr. Samy Bengio, Research Scientist in the Machine Learning group at Google Inc. California, USA. His keynote address was on “Learning a Semantic Space: from Image Annotation to Music Similarity”. Two pre-workshop tutorial sessions were also organised and were delivered by Prof. Gernot Fink of Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, and Professor Koichi Kise of Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. Prof. Fink delivered a tutorial on “Markov Models for Handwriting Recognition”, and Prof. Kise discussed “Large-Scale Document Image Retrieval and Character Recognition with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Techniques”.

The slides of the keynote lecture and the tutorials are available online at the following DAS 2012 webpages:

www.ict.griffith.edu.au/das2012/keynote.html
www.ict.griffith.edu.au/das2012/tutorial.html

The social programs organised during the workshop were very much appreciated by the delegates. An authentic Aboriginal music performance was organised at the welcome reception. The banquet dinner was held at “The Australian Outback Spectacular” and was followed by the Awards ceremony. The IAPR Nakano Best Paper Award went to Albert Gordo, Florent Perronnin, and Ernest Valveny,for their paper titled “Document Classification Using Multiple Views”. The IAPR Best Student Paper award was given to Sheikh Faisal Rashid, Faisal Shafait, and Thomas M. Breuel for their paper “Scanning Neural Network for Text Line Recognition”. And, “An Efficient Framework for Searching Text in Noisy Documents Images” by Ismet Zeki Yalniz and R. Manmatha received Honorable Mention. See photos of the presentations at: www.ict.griffith.edu.au/das2012/awards.html