1st Workshop on

Visual Processing of Digital Manuscripts:
Workflows, Pipelines, Best Practices

ViDiScript @ ICIAP 2023

Monday 11th September, Udine (Italy)

Venue: Palazzo Toppo-Wassermann (morning), Palazzo Caiselli (afternoon)

The workshop aims at collecting and connecting the most recent applications of Computer Vision to Historical Handwritten Documents Processing in its broader sense.

Many initiatives have focused on one dimension of the problem, such as layout analysis, image binarization, transcription or material aspects of the manufact. Very few discussed the full historical document processing workflow and pipeline, and we would like to organise an event that connects the multiple dimensions of the analysis of the manuscript document, in its material and codicological, as well as textual, paratextual and palaeographical aspects. We are also interested in the possibilities offered by Computer Vision tools for the preservation and analysis of ancient and medieval documents, which should be part of the workflow.

The workshop would therefore like to create a concrete meeting point between scholars of the different aspects of the historical handwritten heritage and, at the same time, between Computer Vision scholars, considering the different possibilities offered by this discipline in the treatment of historical documents.

Particular importance will be devoted to interdisciplinary work between Humanities scholars and Computer Science scholars: this perspective of concrete collaboration between the two disciplines, which too often work in parallel, seems to us the only way to promote a technological advancement, made more effective by the historical-cultural contextualisation of data and the concrete needs and peculiarities of manuscript heritage valorisation.

Particularly appreciated will therefore be 'twinning papers' conceived and/or presented by multidisciplinary groups or research initiatives composed of Computer Vision scholars and Humanities scholars.

The aim is to give an account of the individual steps of the workflows and pipelines, starting from the context and study requirements of the manuscript artefact to the concrete IT applications and the characteristics and specificities of each processing step.

The workshop encourages submissions related (but not limited) to the following topics:

Submission and review

We invite submission of papers describing work in the domains suggested above or in closely-related areas.

Participants can choose between two formats:

1. Full paper: accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop, and published in the ICIAP 2023 Workshops volume, edited by Springer. The maximum number of pages is 10 + 2 pages for references. While preparing their contributions, authors must follow the guidelines and technical instructions provided by Springer

2. Abstract and short presentation (1-4 pages) of ongoing projects presenting workflows for preliminary, mid-term or pilot projects are welcome. Although they cannot be published in the conference proceedings, we are considering a separate publication with an international publisher.

Reviewing of submissions will be double-blind.

Each accepted paper must be covered by at least one registered author. Registration can be either for the full event at a regular rate or just for workshops and tutorials (2 days).

Important dates

Submission site

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via the Microsoft CMT Conference system at the following address: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICIAPDHH2023 

Attendance is free for University of Udine students