ICDAR 2011 Tutorial

Key Topics in Administrative Document Analysis

Date: Sep. 18, 2011

Venue: Beijing Friendship Hotel, China

ANNOUNCEMENT:

A number of student stipends (50% off registration fees) are available for the attendance to this event!

Apply online by filling in the form here.

Description

Businesses and organizations along with their clients create a massive amount of documents – faxes, letters, forms, invoices, etc. - that more often than not has to be dealt with in a close to real-time manner. These are vital communications with clients, providers and other stakeholders that flow into, through, and out of the organization.Processing the paper-based correspondence is a work-intensive task. Letters are opened, read, sorted, routed and delivered. Depending on the contents, the contained documents are then forwarded to the appropriate recipient for the required action.The needs of the market have been the leading force behind a huge amount of research and development across the document life-time from digitization to image analysis and from indexing and classification to knowledge management, re-purposing and routing. The collective application of the above processes for the management of document flows at large scales is known as the Digital Mail Room.

Document Analysis research provides solutions for automating the screening process and determining the document type (whether invoice, contract, letter, etc.), and for extracting the relevant information from each document with minimal human intervention. This information is stored into appropriate databases for future querying and feeding outbound communications.

This tutorial will review the key document analysis techniques involved in a document workflow management. The agenda is organized in self-contained lectures addressed by invited specialists. The tutorial is sponsored by the ADAO project, an FP7 Marie-Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) project between the Itesoft Company (France) and the Computer Vision Center, UAB (Spain). ADAO is a technology transfer project focused on document analysis research and development for administrative document processing.

Outline and speakers

Potential target audience

The potential audience of this tutorial is researchers and engineers of document image analysis and recognition at large. In particular, PhD students of document analysis community working in topics such as document classification, logo and trademark recognition, word spotting and document retrieval. It is also addressed to engineers of R&D departments of companies working in administrative document processing. A particular prerequisite knowledge is not required. Basic background in Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition may be useful. 

Interest and impact

Administrative document processing has experienced an increasing demand. Many companies exist in the fields of digital document management, business intelligence, and mass digitization. The automatic processing of high volumes of digitized documents in this framework requires specialized techniques, beyond the traditional OCR, such as document classification in terms of the appearance and the structure, handwriting analysis, form processing, semantic modeling, etc. It has generated a growing business activity that is supported by the advance in the field of Document Image Analysis and Recognition. This tutorial aims, from a practical perspective, to review the state-of-the-art and help practitioners in the development of innovative products.

Resume of the presenters

Vincent Poulain d’Andecy is the Research&Technology Department Manager at ITESOFT (France). Graduate Engineer from INSA Rennes and holder of a DEA, he joined ITESOFT, a European Group which develops document processing and management software, in 1994 as research and development engineer. He successfully contributed to the development of innovative technologies and products and became Project Manager in 1998 to handle large R&D projects like new product development. He took in charge the ITESOFT Research Department in 2000 to deliver the best Document Analysis technologies for ITESOFT product. This Department is focused on the innovation of ITESOFT key technologies like cursive handwriting recognition, image processing, reasoning systems, A.I. expert systems for document analysis, OCR, Text Mining, Data Mining... In addition of supervising the software development, one of its main activities is to develop and manage partnership projects with research labs in order to transfer skills and technologies from the academic domain to the industrial domain. Among the recent experiences, we can quote: collaboration with the universities of Nancy (FR) and Paris 13 (FR) in sharing the management of PhDs, collaboration with the universities of Tours (FR) and Rouen (FR) to develop exploration tasks, collaboration with the Computer Vision Center of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES) in implementing a European transfer of knowledge project (FP7 framework, Marie Curie Actions). Beside these industrial activities, he contributes to the academic activities such as reviewing scientific papers for the programme committee of the CIFED (since 2006) and teaching mission as invited teacher at the University of Tours (FR) and Paris 13 (FR) since 2010.

José A. Rodríguez Serrano is a Research Scientist at the Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE). He received his Master in Computer Vision in 2006 from the Computer Vision Center (CVC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2009 he completed his Ph.D. thesis "Statistical framework and prior information modelling for handwritten word spotting", done in collaboration between with XRCE, where he spent 21 months on a project aimed at detecting words in business correspondence. After his thesis, he worked as a Research Associate at Loughborough University, UK (2008-2009), and as a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (2009-2010). His current research is focused on applying computer vision and document analysis techniques to the areas of business document processing and transportation.

Jean-Marc Ogier received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Rouen, France, in 1994. During this period (1991-1994), he worked on graphic recognition for Matra Ms&I Company. From 1994 to 2000, he was an associate professor at the University of Rennes 1 during a first period (1994-1998)  and at the University of Rouen from 1998 to 2001. Now full professor at the University of la Rochelle, Dr Ogier’s works in the L3i laboratory in which he manages a research group (12 permanent staff, 20 Phd) dealing with Document Analysis. He manages several French and European projects dealing with historical document analysis, either with public institutions, or with private companies. Prof. Ogier is a Deputy Director of the GDR I3 of the French National Research Center (CNRS). He is also Chair of the Technical Committee 10 (Graphic Recognition) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). At last he is also Vice rector of the university of La Rochelle.

Marçal Rusiñol received his B.Sc. and his M.Sc. degrees in Computer Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona, Spain, in 2004 and 2006, respectively. In 2004 he joined the Computer Vision Center where he obtained the Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. Josep Lladós in 2009. He was also a Teaching Assistant at the Computer Sciences Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona during the period between 2005 and 2009. He currently has a position of R&D Project Manager at the Computer Vision Center. He has been involved in several technological transfer projects devoted to administrative documents. His main research interests include Document Image Analysis, Graphics Recognition, Structural Pattern Recognition, Information Retrieval, Classification and Performance Evaluation.

Dimosthenis Karatzas is a "Ramon y Cajal" Research Fellow at the Computer Vision Centre, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He received his PhD from the University of Liverpool, UK in 2003. From 2002 to 2007 he worked as a Research Fellow at the Universities of Liverpool and Southampton, UK. His main research interests are document Image analysis and colour science. He has produced over 40 peer reviewed publications. He has led a number of research and knowledge transfer projects. He was the chair of the WSETM 2009, and served as Publications Chair for ICDAR 2009, while he is serving on the program committees of ICDAR, DAS, PRIS and ICMWI. Dr Karatzas has been a founding member and a member of the executive committee of the UK Chapter of the SPIE, while he is currently a member of the leadership committee of IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems), a member of the IAPR-Industrial Liaison Committee and a member of the IEEE, the SPIE and the IAPR. Dr Karatzas is also a director of the spin-off company TruColour, UK, which specialises on perceptually based colour calibration solutions.

Josep Lladós received the degree in Computer Sciences in 1991 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the PhD degree in Computer Sciences in 1997 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and the Université Paris 8 (France). Currently he is an Associate Professor at the Computer Sciences Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a staff researcher of the Computer Vision Center, where he is also the director since January 2009. He is the head of the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group (2009SGR-00418). He is chair holder of Knowledge Transfer of the UAB Research Park and Santander Bank. His current research fields are document analysis, graphics recognition and structural and syntactic pattern recognition. He has been the head of a number of Computer Vision R+D projects and published more than 100 papers in national and international conferences and journals. J. Lladós is an active member of the Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition Spanish Association (AERFAI), a member society of the IAPR. He is currently the chairman of the IAPR-ILC (Industrial Liaison Committee).  Formerly he served as chairman of the IAPR TC-10, the Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition, and also he is a member of the IAPR TC-11 (reading Systems) and IAPR TC-15 (Graph based Representations). He serves on the Editorial Board of the ELCVIA (Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis) and the IJDAR (International Journal in Document Analysis and Recognition), and also a PC member of a number of international conferences. He was the recipient of the IAPR-ICDAR Young Investigator Award in 2007. He was the general chair of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR’2009) held in Barcelona in July 2009, and co-chair of the IAPR TC-10 Graphics Recognition Workshop of 2003 (Barcelona), 2005 (Hong Kong), 2007 (Curitiba) and 2009 (La Rochelle). Josep Lladós has also experience in technological transfer and in 2002 he created the company ICAR Vision Systems, a spin-off of the Computer Vision Center working on Document Image Analysis, after winning the entrepreneurs award from the Catalonia Government on business projects on Information Society Technologies in 2000.

News

• 09/18/2011
  ADAO Workshop
• 09/08/2011
  Student Stipends Available for ICDAR Tutorial
• 05/27/2011
  Mid term review