THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER SEGMENTATION CONTEST at ICDAR'2001 http://www.lpa.gr/contest CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The aim of this contest is to evaluate all existing algorithms for document image segmentation that can be applied to Newspaper page segmentation. Many algorithms for page segmentation have been proposed by several research groups dealing with document image processing. However, many of these algorithms are not directly applicable to newspaper images, which present special problems. The most significant problems identified include the complex layout of newspaper pages, particularly the oldest ones, where text columns are located very close to each other in a haphazard way, as well as the poor scanning results derived from paper material that was originally of low print quality or has deteriorated through time. Another important problem for newspaper page segmentation is the layout habits that seem to have changed repeatedly. We have selected to evaluate the tracing of all basic entities that appear in most newspaper pages and cover a time period from the beginning of the previous century till today. We selected entities that belong to text regions, lines and images/drawings. Training and test sets: Both training and test sets come from Greek and English newspapers. The Greek newspapers are "TO VIMA" (THE TRIBUNE) and "ELETHERON VIMA" (FREE TRIBUNE) and we have selected front pages from years 1922, 1940 and 1968. Both newspapers are published by Lambrakis Press S.A.. The English speaking newspaper is the "International Herald Tribune" and we have selected front pages from years 1900, 1925 and 1950. Performance Evaluation: The performance evaluation method that will be used is based on counting the number of matches between the entities detected by the algorithm and the entities in the ground truth. We use a global MatchScore table for all entities whose values are calculated according to the intersection of the ON pixel sets of the result and the ground truth. In order to evaluate the detection of newspaper page components, we employ a global performance metric that combines the average values of detection rate and recognition accuracy. Participating benefits: We will collect all segmentation results and automatically rank all efforts. The best working algorithms will appear in a report that will be prepared by the contest organisers. Authors of the highest ranking algorithms will be invited to prepare papers that will be included at ICDAR 2001 proceedings and presented in an oral session during the conference. Important dates: Register Interest & Download Training set: ASAP Download Test set: May 1, 2001 E-mail results and algorithm description: May 14,2001 Results announcement & notification to participants with best working algorithms to prepare a paper: May 16,2001 Submission of all papers: June 4, 2001 Notification of acceptance: June 11, 2001 Camera-ready manuscripts received: June 30, 2001 Organizing Committee: Dr Basilis Gatos Head of Research Lambrakis Press Archives Department of Digital Technologies 8, Heyden Street, 104 34 Athens, Greece Tel: +30-1-8252680, +30-1-8252540 Fax: +30-1-8250040 E-mail: bgatos@lpa.gr URL: http://www.lpa.gr Dr Apostolos Antonacopoulos Lecturer, Dept. of Computer Science The University of Liverpool Chadwick Building, Peach Street Liverpool, L69 7ZF, U.K. Tel.: +44 (151) 794 3695 Fax.: +44 (151) 794 3715 E-mail: aa@csc.liv.ac.uk URL: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~aa