Contact - ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Scene Text Visual Question Answering

For any queries about this challenge, please contact us at rrc@cvc.uab.es

Ali F. Biten received the B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the Bogazici University, Turkey, in 2013 and his M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona in 2018.  The same year, he joined the Computer Vision Center (CVC) as an Intern Student. Currently, he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Image Captioning under the supervision of Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas. His research interests lies at the intersection of vision and language, usually applied to scene understanding.

Rubèn P. Tito received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 2016 and 2018, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, respectively. The same year he joined the Computer Vision Center (CVC) as an intern student where he is doing his Ph.D. in “Single Shot Text Retrieval” under the supervision of Dr. Marçal Rossinyol and Dr. Ernest Valveny. His main research interests include text recognition, word spotting and multi-modal embeddings.

Andrés Mafla received his B.Sc. degree (with honours) in Telecommunications and Electronic Engineering from Escuela Politécnica del Ejército, Ecuador in 2012. He obtained a M.Sc. degree in Engineering Management from The University of Melbourne in 2014 and a M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona in 2018. The same year he joined the Computer Vision Center (CVC) as an intern student. Currently, he is a pursuing a Ph.D. degree in in the Intelligent Reading Systems research group under the supervision of Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas. His research interests includes text detection and recognition, scene text image retrieval, multi modal embeddings and scene understanding.

Lluís Gómez i Bigordà is a TECNIOspring Research Fellow (H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions of the European Union) at at the Computer Vision Center (CVC), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2016. As a member of the Robust Reading research team at the Computer Vision Centre, and of the document analysis community, he has contributed several papers to the field and has had the chance to collaborate with a variety of research groups and venues. He has collaborated with other prominent research groups in the organization of the ICDAR Robust Reading Competition in their 2013, 2015, and 2017 editions. He served as an area chair of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2017), as a chair and organizer of the International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2017) and the International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR 2018); as well as a member of the Program Committee of CBDAR 2015, IWRR 2014, IWRR 2016, and DAS 2018. In 2016 he co-organized a Tutorial on "Scene-Text Localization, Recognition, and Understanding" in the International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2016).

Marçal Rusiñol is an Associate Researcher at the Computer Vision Center within the Intelligent Reading Systems research group, being the PI of several competitive research and tech. transfer projects. 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 has been a Teaching Assistant and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Computer Sciences Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from 2005. He hold two postdoctoral Marie Curie fellowships at ITESOFT and at the L3i Lab in the Université de La Rochelle (France) respectively. He has co-authored over 70 publications in refereed journals and conferences and with 1000+ citations, has an H-index of 18. His main research interests include Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Data Science, Reading Systems, Information Retrieval, Digital Humanities and Performance Evaluation.

Minesh Mathew recieved his Btech degree in computer science from NIT Warangal, India in 2009. He joined International Institute of Information Technoloy, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) India in 2013 as a Masters student. Currently he is pursuing his Ph.D under the supervision of Prof. CV Jawahar. He is a recepient of the TCS PhD fellowship for Computer Science. He has primarily been working on the problem of text recognition for Indian scripts and Arabic in document images and scene images.

C. V. Jawahar is the Amazon Chair professor at IIIT Hyderabad, India. At IIIT Hyderabad, Jawahar leads a group focusing on computer vision, machine learning, document analysis and multimedia systems. He has been looking into a set of problems that overlap with vision, language and text. In the past. He has served as a chair for previous editions of ACCV, WACV, IJCAI, ICDAR and ICVGIP. Presently, he is an area editor of CVIU and an associate editor of IEEE PAMI. He is also a program co-chair for ACCV 2018.

Ernest Valveny received the PhD degree in 1999 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain. He joined the Computer Science Department at UAB in 1992 as an assistant professor and since 2002 as an Associate Professor. Since 2013 he is the Director of the Computer Science Department. He is also a researcher at the Computer Vision Centre, where he is a member of the Robust Reading research unit. His main research interests are computer vision and pattern recognition, and in particular text recognition and retrieval, shape representation, document classification and graph matching. He has published more than 20 papers in international indexed journals and more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed international conferences, with more than 1700 citations. He has an h-index of 25. He has participated in a number of national and international research projects mainly related to document analysis and robust reading. He has also led several technology transfer contracts with companies, mainly related to the design and implementation of robust reading systems in open environments. He is currently a member of IAPR and of the editorial board of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. He has served as a reviewer and member of the committee program for many of the most relevant international journals and conferences within the area of computer vision and pattern recognition (PAMI, Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC, ...). He has actively participated in the organization of several research events.

Dimosthenis Karatzas is an associate professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and associate director of the Computer Vision Centre (CVC) in Barcelona, Spain. At the CVC he leads the vision and language research line, working at the intersection of computer vision and text analysis. He has co-authored over 100 publications in refereed journals and conferences and has an H-index of 23. He was the recipient of the 2013 IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, and Google Faculty Research Award in 2017. D. Karatzas has served in various roles at major conferences in his field (ICDAR, DAS, CBDAR, ICPR, ICFHR), including co-chairing IWRR 2014/16/18 and CBDAR 2015/17. D. Karatzas is a lead organiser of the Robust Reading Competitions series. He is the chair of the Technical Committee 11 on Reading Systems of the Int. Association of Pattern Recognition. D. 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 IAPR-Education Committee and member of the IEEE the IAPR. He is one of the founders of the Library Living Lab, an open participatory innovation space in a public library.