Welcome to the second edition of the workshop on

Drawings and abstract Imagery: Representation and Analysis (DIRA)!

Illustrations, drawings, technical diagrams, and charts can communicate difficult concepts very quickly to humans. This type of visual information is prevalent in technical, scientific, and scholarly publications; as well as instruction manuals, textbooks, and infographics in popular media. However, many open challenges in computer vision for automatically processing this visual data remain. These abstract images have very different properties from natural images; for example, informative pixels are sparse, while the shape and spatial information are more important than color, texture, and shading which dominate natural images. While deep learning methods are quite successful in object detection and content-based retrieval in natural images; it is not clear when these approaches will transfer successfully to these much sparser abstract drawings.

The DIRA workshop aims to bring together researchers from both industry and academia who are working in diverse areas of research in the representation, analysis, and applications of abstract images, such as illustrations, drawings, technical diagrams, charts, and plots. The goal of the workshop is to explore and highlight technical challenges, insights, and solutions that exist in representation, information extraction, semantic understanding, content-based retrieval, question-answering, and various other topics pertaining to the representation and analysis of abstract images, which has traditionally lagged behind progress in their natural image counterparts.

The DIRA workshop will also host a data competition focused on abstract drawing retrieval on the DeepPatent dataset to encourage increased research and engineering activity in this field.

We hope to see you in Tel Aviv or Online!

News:

• Workshop taking place live on Monday, October 24 at the David Intercontinental, Salon I

• Schedule now posted (check below in case of any changes).

• The DIRA Data Challenge is online on CodaLab!

• Call for papers -- See below!

• DIRA workshop has been accepted for a full-day hybrid event at ECCV 2022. We will accept both short and full-length papers.

Monday, October 24, 2022

David Intercontinental, Salon I

Remote participation instructions will be provided to registrants.

All times are local to Tel Aviv (GMT+3)