CALL FOR PAPERS
 DOCUMENT RECOGNITION AND RETRIEVAL VII
 
 Part of IS&T/SPIE's Electronic Imaging 2000
              San Jose, CA
          January 26-27, 2000
 
 http://www.spie.org/web/meetings/calls/pw00/confs/ei18.html
 
 Conference Chairs: Daniel P. Lopresti, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs.;
 Jiangying Zhou, Summus, Ltd.
 
 Program Committee: Francine R. Chen, Xerox Palo Alto Research Ctr.;
 David S. Doermann, Univ. of Maryland/College Park; Jonathan J. Hull,
 Ricoh California Research Ctr.; Paul Kantor, Rutgers University; Jan
 Pedersen, Infoseek; Larry Spitz, Document Recognition Technologies,
 Inc.; Kazem Taghva, Univ. of Nevada/Las Vegas; Ellen Voorhees, National
 Institute of Standards and Technology
 
 The fields of document recognition and retrieval have grown rapidly in
 recent years. This growth has been fueled by increasing accuracy rates
 for omnifont and handprint optical character recognition (OCR),
 decreasing costs for the computational power needed to run such
 sophisticated algorithms, and the emergence of new application areas
 such as the World Wide Web (WWW) and digital libraries. The use of OCR
 is spreading from restricted, high-volume domains to more general tasks,
 
 including the processing of noisy "real-world" documents, photocopies,
 faxes, and microfiches.
 
 Beyond OCR, document recognition includes the recovery of a document's
 logical structure and format. This encompasses decomposing a document
 into its various basic components (paragraphs, figures, tables, etc.),
 tagging these units, and then determining a higher-level structure for
 the document as a whole. The analysis of these entities may include
 attempting to understand the structure of tables and equations, or the
 conversion of line drawings from raster to vector format.
 
 The synergy between document retrieval and document recognition is a key
 
 theme of this conference, since retrieval plays a crucial role as the
 driving application for much current research in document recognition,
 as can be seen in the WWW and digital libraries. This includes access
 to scanned text documents as well as direct search over graphical
 elements and other multi-media search methods.
 
 Papers are solicited in the following areas:
 
 Recognition:
 - algorithms and systems for machine-printed and handwritten character
   and word recognition, especially for degraded documents (e.g., faxes)
 - character segmentation techniques
 - segmentation-free recognition
 - identification and analysis of tables and equations
 - page segmentation, including text and graphics separation,
   hierarchical decomposition of documents, and segmentation of halftones
   and line-art, particularly for noisy and complex documents
 - logical structure analysis
 - raster-to-vector conversion of line-art, maps, and technical drawings
 - filtering and enhancement techniques for document images
 - document image compression
 - extraction of information from compressed images
 - document degradation models
 - document recognition and the WWW
 - applications of recognition technologies to the building of digital
   libraries.
 
 Retrieval:
 - impact of recognition accuracy on retrieval effectiveness
 - keyword spotting in document images
 - recovery and use of logical structure for retrieval
 - use of metadata in retrieval
 - relevance feedback techniques for document retrieval
 - multi-lingual retrieval
 - document image categorization
 - approximate string matching algorithms for OCR-generated text
 - non-textual retrieval methods
 - image and multimedia search
 - benchmarking and evaluation issues.
 
 Important dates:
   Submissions due:  June 14, 1999
   Notification of acceptance via WWW:  September 27, 1999
   Notification of acceptance via postal mail:  October 15, 1999
   Camera-ready manuscripts due:  November 1, 1999
 
 Submissions to Document Recognition and Retrieval VII should be extended
 abstracts (6 pages / 2,500 words maximum). While June 14, 1999 is the
 official due date, late submissions may be permitted depending on the
 program. For more information and submission instructions, please see
 the Electronic Imaging 2000 Web site at:  http://www.spie.org/info/ei.