ICDAR is co-sponsored by the IAPR Technical Committees TC10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC11 (Reading Systems). ICDAR 2007 was organized by Flavio Bortolozzi (Brazil) and Robert Sabourin (Canada). The event was a real success with 307 participants coming from seven continents (37 countries). The distribution of participants among academic and industry is quite interesting. 25% of the attendees came from the industry, 30 were registered as students and 45% as academics. The huge number of industrial researchers demonstrates the maturity of the DAR area. To sum up, more than 36 different companies were represented at ICDAR. About the tutorials, very interesting topics were presented during the first day. Four topics were offered: Forensic document examiners approach (25 attendees), Computational Forensic (14), HMM for handwriting recognition (34) and Document image compression techniques (8). All participants were very satisfied about the quality of the presentations.

As we proposed to the ICDAR community during the TC10-11 meeting in Edinburgh (2003), both satellite workshops GREC2007 (see related article in this issue) and CBDAR2007 were organized just before ICDAR in Curitiba. All events were very successful and the local organization team leaded by Luiz S. Oliveira did a tremendous job. Concerning the satellite workshops, GREC2007 attracted 50 attendees and 40 for CBDAR2007. Moreover, 75% (GREC) and 85% (CBDAR) of the participants stayed in Curitiba to attend ICDAR as well.

Coming back to ICDAR, the review process was managed by Abdel Belaid, Dave Dormann and Hiromichi Fujisawa. We received 378 submissions, which surpassed all the previous editions of ICDAR (see Figure 1).  The program committee accepted 251 papers (66.4%). According to the standard layout of ICDAR, the technical program was organized with three tracks in parallel for a 3-day event. 102 papers were retained for oral presentations and 149 as posters. According to the feedback of several attendees, the scientific level of the conference was very good. The ICDAR 2007 organizing committee would like to thanks the 313 reviewers for their very good reviews. We received more than 98% of the review reports which is excellent compared to past editions of ICDAR.

Conference Report:  ICDAR 2007

Conference Chairs::

Flavio Bortolozzi

Robert Sabourin

In addition to the regular sessions, four prestigious keynotes were presented by Hiromichi Fujisawa (A View on the Past and Future of Character and Document Recognition), Yann LeCun (Energy-Based Learning in Document Recognition and Computer Vision), Luc Vincent (Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale) and Lambert Schomaker (Advances in Writer Identification and Verification). All Keynotes were really appreciated by the participants who were motivated to ask questions after the talks. It is worth remarking that Google offered each participant a database composed of 68 scanned books for research purposes. A bigger database, which contains 1000 books (something like 300.000 pages) is also available upon request.

Coming back to the official aspect of the conference, two IAPR/ICDAR awards were given this year. The IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award was presented at the end of the opening session to Dr. Hiromichi Fujisawa for outstanding contributions to industrial document analysis and to the ICDAR community. Moreover, the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award was presented during the banquet to Prof. Josep Llados for his outstanding service to the ICDAR community and his innovative research in graphics recognition. Both awardees were nominated by the ICDAR 2007 AWARDS COMMITTEE composed of Dr. David Doermann (IJDAR EIC), Dr. Wanyin Liu (TC10 Chair), Dr. Jianying Hu (TC11 Chair), Prof. Robert Sabourin (ICDAR 2007 Co-Chair), Prof Ching Y. Suen (Previous winner of Outstanding Achievements Award), Dr. Apostolos Antonacouplous (TC11 representative / Previous winner of Young Investigator Award) and Prof. Young-Bin Kwon (TC10 representative).

Several technical meetings were organized during ICDAR. The ICDAR 2009 executive meeting was chaired by Josep Llados. Among other things, a review of several aspects related to the conference organization, proceedings, venue and review process were discussed. Moreover, technical meetings related to the planning of the next DAS 2008 and ICFHR 2008 were held as well. Finally, the traditional TC10-11 meeting was very popular this year. The bid for ICDAR 2011 was presented by Dr. Cheng-Lin Liu and it was accepted by all participants. Hence,  ICDAR 2011 will be hosted by Tsinghua University and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

This year, we offered great visibility to the presentation of the competition reports. In order to do it, the session was designed as a plenary session just before the closing session. In this way, all ICDAR participants attended the presentation of the competition reports. Three competitions were organized in ICDAR 2007: Arabic Handwriting Competition (Organizers: Volker Margner and Haikal El Abed); Page Segmentation (Organizers: Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Basilis Gatos); and Handwriting Segmentation (Organizers: Basilis Gatos and Apostolos Antonacopoulos). The winners were T. Alary, J. Rottland, and M-P. Schamback from Siemens AG Industrial Solutions and Services, Germany (Arabic Handwriting Recognition),  S. P. Chouwdhury, S. Mandal, A. K. Das, and B. Chanda from the Bengal Engineering and Science University and Indian Statistical Institure, India (Page Segmentation), and V. Papavassiliou, T. Stafylakis, V. Katsouros, and G. Carayannis from the Institure for Language and Speech Processing, Greece (Handwriting Segmentation). Since GREC 2007 was organized in Curitiba the week before ICDAR, it was decided to present the results of GREC contests (Arc segmentation and the Symbol recognition competitions) during the same section.

The announcements of the IAPR/ICDAR Best Paper Award, the IAPR/ICDAR Best Student Paper Award and the IAPR/ICDAR Best Poster Award were done during the closing session. In this ICDAR edition, besides the quality of the paper related by the reviewers, the quality of the presentations and the clarity of the answers to the questions were considered in the overall evaluation of the awards by the Award Committee. The Award Committee was composed of Henryi Baird (Lehigh University, USA), Alessandro Koerich (PUCPR, Brazil), Young-Bin Kwon (Chungang University, South Korea), Umapda Pal (ISI, Kolkata, India),  Rolf Ingold (Fribourg Univ, Switzerland), and Abdel Belaïd (Loria, France). The Award committee was chaired by Abdel Belaid and Hiromichi Fujisawa.

The 2007 IAPR/ICDAR Awards are:

IAPR/ICDAR Best Paper Award:  Extraction of Embedded Class Information from Universal Character Pattern, S. Uchida, M. Sakai (Kyushu University), M. Iwamura (Osaka Prefecture University), S. Omachi (Tohoku University) and K. Kise (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan).

IAPR/ICDAR Best Student Paper Award:    Language Models for Handwritten Short Message Services, E. Prochasson, C. Viard-Gaudin and E. Morin (University of Nantes).

IAPR/ICDAR Best Poster Award:  Novel Binarization System for Degraded Document Images, Y. Xi and Y. Chen (Tsinghua University, China).

On behalf the ICDAR 2007 organizing committee we would like to congratulate the awardees for their excellent contribution.

ICDAR 2009 will be held in Barcelona, Spain. We congratulate the organizers and wish them a lot of success with the organization!

Figure 1: Submission vs acceptation since ICDAR 1991