Doermann Chairs International ICDAR Conference

Scientists, scholars and others interested in the latest advances in document analysis and recognition are encouraged to attend an international conference in Washington, D.C. next month.

The 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) -- set for Aug. 26 through Aug. 28 at the Omni Shoreham hotel -- features hundreds of oral and poster presentations on timely and relevant topics like analyzing and restoring degraded text, modeling paper aging for forensic purposes, and identifying intrinsic features in fraudulent documents.

The biennial conference is accentuated by three keynote talks: the neuromotor aspects of handwriting (Réjean Plamondon, professor at Polytechnique Montreal and the 2013 ICDAR outstanding achievement award winner); using imaging technologies to enable manuscript scholars to uncover lost or unexpected material (Roger Easton, professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology); and the generality of graphic and text tools, and what can be learned from relationships between them (Michael Lesk, professor at Rutgers University).

“The conference is really the premier event for anyone wanting to stay abreast of the latest trends and technology in our field,” says David Doermann, a senior research scientist in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies who is serving as general chair of this year’s event.

Organizers point out that ICDAR 2013 is also an international networking event, with participants from France, the Netherlands, China, Greece, Japan, Korea, Canada and at least a half-dozen other countries expected to attend.

Participants can visit nearby attractions in Washington, D.C. during down time from the conference. The Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo, the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial and more -- all free of charge -- are with walking distance or a short subway ride away from the Omni Shoreham.

In conjunction with the conference, organizers say they are proud to continue the ICDAR Doctoral Consortium, which pairs the next generation of researchers with top mentors in the field. This year, the consortium teams will present a series of tutorials and workshops on Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AHOCR), Camera-Based Document Analysis (CBDAR), Arabic Handwriting (OpenHaRT), Multilingual Optical Character Recognition (MOCR) and Historic Document Processing (HIP).

The conference is sponsored in part by Raytheon, BBN Technologies, ABBYY, Google, Hitachi and other companies, with additional support coming from the University at Buffalo, the University of Maryland and Lehigh University.

For more information and to register, go to http://www.icdar2013.org. Please note that any U.S. government employee is eligible to receive the Early Bird registration rate.