Organizers

The team of organizers for ICDAR2019-FGC competition involves experienced researchers that have been involved in organizing scientific events (competitions, tutorials, workshops etc.) for major conferences like ICDAR and ICPR in recent past. We have senior professors and scientists in our team for having their expert opinion and feedback to ensure a high scientific level of the work, as well as young researchers with energy and state-of-the-art knowledge for ensuring smooth organization of the competition.

BURIE Jean-Christophe (Professor) received his Ph.D. degree in Automatic Control Engineering and Industrial Data Processing from University of Lille, France, in 1995. He was a research fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering for Computer-Controlled Machinery, Osaka University, Japan from 1995 to 1997 in the framework of the Lavoisier Program of the French Foreign Office. He works at La Rochelle University since 1998. He is currently full Professor and deputy director of the L3i Lab. He has been involved in the European Project EUREKA- Prometheus and has actively contributed to the ANR projects: Alpage, Shades, Eclats. His research interests include computer vision, color image processing, pattern recognition. His research topics concerns color document analysis indexing of Comics, characters recognition written on old palm leaves. Since 2011, he is co-leader of the e-bdtheque research program dedicated to the indexing of comics’ books. Since 2018, he is the Head of the SAIL joint laboratory (Sequential Art Image Laboratory) with the Actialuna company. He participated for organizing the SmartDoc competition for ICDAR 2015 and the Competition on the Analysis of Handwritten Text in Images of Balinese Palm Leaf Manuscripts for ICFHR 2016 and ICFHR 2018. He served the International Association for Pattern Recognition TC-10 Committee as Secretary and Webmaster from 2009 to 2018 and he is now acting as Vice-Chair of TC10. . He was the co-organizer of MANPU 2016 (Cancun, Mexico), MANPU 2017 and HDI 2017 (Kyoto, Japan), MANPU 2019(Thessalonique, Greece). He was the General Chair of the 2nd IAPR TC10/TC11 Summer School in La Rochelle (july 2018).

DUTTA Anjan (Ph.D.) is a Marie-Curie COFUND postdoctoral fellow under the P-SPHERE project at the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona. He received PhD in Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in the year of 2014. His doctoral thesis was awarded as Cum Laude qualification (highest grade) with International mention. Moreover, he received the Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award for the year 2013-14 by the UAB for outstanding dissertation. After completing his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at a few academic institutes including Télécom ParisTech, Paris; Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Until now, he has communicated 9 articles in ISI-JCR international journals including PR, PRL, MTA, IJDAR, IJPRAI and 23 articles in various international conferences including ACCV, ICDAR, ICPR, ICFHR, DAS etc. He is a regular reviewer for the journals named IJCV, IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TCYB, PR, PRL etc, he served as a program committee member of different scientific conferences such as BMVC, ICPR, ICFHR etc. His recent research interests have revolved around graph-based representation and algorithms, graph neural network and multimodal deep learning.

LE Thanh Nam is currently a PhD student at the L3i Laboratory, University of La Rochelle, France; and is going to defense his thesis soon. His research is carried under the supervision of Jean-Marc Ogier, Jean-Christophe Burie and Muzzamil Luqman from L3i Laboratory. He is interested in the topic of recognizing and retrieval of drawing content in comic books, using computer vision techniques, graph representation of comic content, and graph mining techniques. The goal of the thesis is towards automatic annotating/indexing of semantic content, and on content-based retrieval of the comic book images. Nam Le has publications on the topics of representing the comic content by attributed Regional Adjacency Graphs (RAG) and using graph mining technique for the retrieval.

LLADOS Josep (Professor) received the degree in Computer Sciences in 1991 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the PhD degree in Computer Science 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 visiting researcher of the IDAKS Lab of the Osaka Prefecture University (Japan). He is chair holder of Knowledge Transfer of the UAB Research Park and Santander Bank. He is the head of the Pattern Recognition and Document Analysis Group (2014SGR-1436). His current research fields are document analysis, structural and syntactic pattern recognition and computer vision. He has been the head of a number of Computer Vision R+D projects and published more than 200 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 Educational Committee. Formerly he served as chairman of the IAPR Industrial Liaison Committee, and the IAPR TC-10, the Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition. He is chief editor of the ELCVIA (Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis) and he serves on the Editorial Board of the IJDAR (International Journal in Document Analysis and Recognition), the Cultural Heritage Digitization (specialty section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities), 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 CVC/UAB.

LUQMAN Muhammad Muzzamil (Ph.D.) is a research scientist in Document Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision. Luqman is currently working on the post of Research Engineer (Permanent) at the L3i Laboratory, University of La Rochelle (France) since November 2015. Luqman has worked as a Research Engineer at the Bordeaux Bioinformatics Center (Centre de Bioinformatique de Bordeaux), France and has worked as a Postdoctoral researcher with Professor Jean-Marc Ogier, at L3i Laboratory, University of La Rochelle (France). Luqman has a PhD in Computer Science from François Rabelais University of Tours (France) and Autonoma University of Barcelona (Spain). His PhD thesis was co-supervised by Professor Jean-Yves Ramel and Professor Josep Llados; and was titled “Fuzzy Multilevel Graph Embedding for Recognition, Indexing and Retrieval of Graphic Document Images”. Luqman participated in GEPR contest of ICPR 2010 and his method was ranked 3rd. His research interests include Structural Pattern Recognition, Document Image Analysis, Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition, Graphics Recognition, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Augmented Reality and Biomimicry. Luqman has authored more than 25 scientific publications including a book, a journal paper and international conference papers. Luqman is a regular reviewer for journals (PR, PRL, IJDAR, IJPRAI, IJCSAI, TALLIP), he regularly serves on the program committees of many international scientific events (ICDAR, ICPR, DAS, CIFED, ICET, GREC, CBDAR, IWRR) and has actively participated in organizing several international conferences and workshops (CLA 2013, DAS 2014, IDAKS 2016, ICDAR 2015, ICPR 2016, CBDAR 2017). Luqman actively participated recently for organizing the SmartDoc competition for ICDAR 2015, SSGCI competition for ICPR 2016 and Multilingual Text detection/recognition (RRC-MLT) for ICDAR 2017. Luqman was co-presenter of the GMPRDIA (Graph-based Methods in Pattern Recognition and Document Image Analysis) tutorial for ICDAR 2017 and was co-organizer of the workshop CBDAR 2017.

MING Zuheng (Ph.D.) is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Information, Image and Interaction Laboratory of University of La Rochelle (L3i). He received PhD in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble Alpes in the year of 2014. After completing his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Information research Laboratory (LaBRI). He has published his works on international conferences including FG, ICCV, ICPR, ICASSP, INTERSPEECH etc. He also serves as a regular reviewer of the open source journals named SENSORS, ALGORITHMS etc; and as a program committee member of ICPR. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, multi-model learning and in particular, on face analysis for facial expression recognition, face recognition etc.

NGUYEN Nhu Van (Ph.D.) is a research scientist in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Van Nguyen is currently working at the L3i Laboratory, the University of La Rochelle (France) as a postdoctoral researcher. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of La Rochelle in 2011. His research interests include Document Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition, and Machine Learning. Van Nguyen is a reviewer for journals/conferences (MTAP, ICDAR, ELCVIA, MMM, RIVF). He has also gained experience in technological transfer after working with La SATT Grand-Centre (Société d’accélération du transfert de technologies) in 2015 to transfer his invention at the lab L3i to the industry. Van Nguyen is a member and an innovation leader of the global association of Vietnamese scientists and experts (AVSE-G).

RIGAUD Christophe (Ph.D.) is a research engineer (postdoc) in document image analysis at the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle (France). He received a double European PhD degree in computer science from the University of La Rochelle (France) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2014. His PhD thesis is titled “Segmentation and indexation of complex objects in comic book images”, supervised by Jean-Christophe Burie, Jean-Marc Ogier from L3i lab and Dimosthenis Karatzas from the Center of Computer Vision (CVC) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His current research interest is the analysis of comic book images using computer vision techniques. He aims to discover how to make a complete and automatic description of the comic page image content, namely the position of the panels, speech balloons, text, comic characters, their interactions and semantic meaning. Christophe Rigaud has authored 20 scientific publications including 5 book chapters, 3 journals and several international conference and workshop papers. He also serves several local and program committees such as the Concept Lattices and their Applications (CLA’13), Engineering Drawing Challenge for GREC’15, Multi-lingual scene text detection and script identification (RRC-MLT) for ICDAR’17 and Subgraph Spotting in Graph-based representations of Comic Images (SSGCI) for ICPR’18.