ICFHR 2010 was organized by the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit of Indian Statistical Institute. ICFHR is one of the major conferences of the IAPR Technical Committee on Reading Systems (TC-11) and is organized in alternate years around the globe. This is the first time that this ICFHR was held in India and it received very good response.

Researchers from 36 different countries participated in this prestigious event. In total, 162 papers covering the diverse fields of handwriting recognition were submitted to this Conference and based on peer reviews 37 (22.8%) of them were accepted for oral presentation and another 80 (49.4%) papers were accepted for poster presentation in its single track sessions. The majority of submissions came from several countries like China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Spain. A total of 129 participants from various countries attended the event.

In the keynote address entitled “The evolution of Document Authentication”, Prof. David Doermann of University of Maryland, surveyed the topic, proposed new approaches, and raised new challenges on automatic authentication of documents. Two other invited talks entitled “Neuromuscular Studies of Handwriting Generation” and “Contribution of Ancient Indians to Writing” were respectively delivered by Prof. R. Plamondon, IAPR Fellolw, of École Polytechnique de Montréal and Prof. M. A. Lakshmithathachar of Samskrti Foundation.

For this edition of ICFHR, six pre-conference tutorials and seven competitions were organized. The tutorials held were on

· Markov Models for Handwriting Recognition

· Handwritten Text / Word Recognition Systems -- Conception, Approaches, and Evaluation

· Information Retrieval from Handwritten Documents

· Signature Verification - Forensic Examiners' Perception and Solutions for Off-line and On-line Signatures

· Multimodal Computer Assisted Transcription of Handwriting Images and

· Hands-on Session Build Your Own Handwriting Recognizer.

The competitions were organized on:

· Arabic Handwriting Recognition

· Forensic Signature Verification

· Quantitative evaluation of binarization algorithms of images of historical documents with bleeding noise

· Handwriting Segmentation

· Handwritten Historical Document Recognition

· On-Line Arabic Handwriting Recognition,

· H-DIBCO 2010 - Handwritten Document Image Binarization Competition.

Also, this time, IAPR sponsored awards were announced for the best student paper and winners of software competitions. Moreover, Itesoft, a European company providing solutions to automatic document processing tasks offered three awards, viz., Best Paper Award, Best Poster Paper Award and Best Industrial Paper Award.

In addition to its intense technical activities, evening programs presenting some of the rich cultural heritages of India were highly appreciated by the participants. On the evening of November 15th, the choreographic presentations by the famous ‘Mamata Shankar Ballet Troupe’ was followed by the Welcome Dinner. In the next evening, a catamaran-cruise was organized along with local folk songs and a light dinner on the river Ganges. The Banquet ceremony was held on the evening of November 17th along with a classical Indian music recital on Sitar with Tabla (a pair of traditional Indian drums). In the concluding phase of this Banquet ceremony Prof. Sebastiano Impedovo invited all the participants to attend the 13th ICFHR in the historical Italian city Bari, September 18-20, 2012.

Finally, in the concluding ceremony on the last day several participants spoke highly of the warm hospitality extended by the organizers.

Conference Report: ICFHR 2010

Report prepared by Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri, IAPR Fellow (India)

Program Chairs:

 

J. H. Kim, IAPR Fellow (South Korea)

M. Shridhar (USA)

E. Anguetil (France)

F. Kimura, IAPR Fellow (Japan)

General Chairs:

 

B. B. Chaudhuri, IAPR Fellow (India)

S. N. Srihari, IAPR Fellow (USA)

L. Schomaker (The Netherlands)

Proceedings of

ICFHR 2010

are available online

through

IEEEXplore

ICFHR 2010 Awards

 

IAPR-sponsored awards:

 

IAPR best student paper award

Document-Zone Classification in

Torn Documents

Sukalpa Chanda, Katrin Franke,

and Umapada Pal

 

IAPR awards for Software Competitions

Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition

Pattern Recognition and

Human Language Technology (PRHLT) group

from the

Universitat Politècnia de València (UPV), Spain

AdriàGiménez Pastor, Ihab Khoury, and

Alfons Juan Císcar

 

Forensic Signature Verification Competition

(4NSigComp2010): Scenario 1

Parascript LTD, USA

Contact:  Tim Strunkov

 

Forensic Signature Verification Competition

(4NSigComp2010): Scenario 2

Parascript LTD, USA

Contact:  Tim Strunkov

 

Quantitative Evaluation of

Binarization Algorithms of

Images of Historical Documents

with Bleeding Noise Competition

Synchromedia Laboratory for

Multimedia Communication in Telepresence of

Ecole de Technologie Suprieure (ETS),

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Rachid Hedjam and

 Mohamed Cheriet

 

Handwriting Segmentation Competition

NifiSoft, Saint-Etienne, France

Abdelâali Hassaïne

 

Handwritten Document Image Binarization

Competition (H-DIBCO 2010)

National University of Singapore &

Institut for Infocomm Research, Singapore

B. Su, S.Lu and C. L. Tan

and

Ben-Gurion University,

Computer Science Department, Israel

I. Bar-Yosef, K. Kedem and I. Dinstein

 

For additional information on the competitions,

 please refer to

International Conference on

Frontiers in

Handwriting Recognition

(ICFHR 2010) -

Competitions Overview

by H. El Abed, V.  Märgner, and M. Blumenstein

 

ssssssssssss

 

ITESOFT Awards:

 

ITESOFT best paper award

(Joint winner)

(i) Tracking and Retrieval of

Pen Tip Positions for an

Intelligent Camera Pen

Kazumasa Iwata, Koichi Kise,

Masakazu Iwamura, Seiichi Uchida,

and Shinichiro Omachi

 

(ii) Retrieving Handwriting Styles:

A Content Based Approach to

Handwritten Document Retrieval

Anurag Bhardwaj,

Achint Oommen Thomas,

Yun Fu, and Venu Govindaraju

 

ITESOFT best poster paper award

Techniques to Enhance Images

for Mokkan Interpretation

Jun Takakura, Akihito Kitadai,

Masaki Nakagawa, Hajime Baba,

and Akihiro Watanabe

 

ITESOFT best industrial paper award

Path Evaluation and

Character Classifier Training on

Integrated Segmentation and

Recognition of Online Handwritten

Japanese Character String

Yojiro Tonouchi

During the inaugural ceremony for ICPR2010, wicks of a lamp-cluster were ignited for an auspicious beginning to the conference.

Here (from left) are Prof L. Schomaker (candle in hand), Prof D. Doermann, Prof. B Chaudhuri, and Mr P Chattaraj. In the background is Indian Statistical Institute Dirctor Prof Bimal Roy.