Text detection and recognition in a natural environment are key components of many applications, ranging from business card digitization to shop indexation in a street. This competition aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to detect Multi-Lingual Text (MLT) in scene images, such as in contents gathered from the Internet media and in modern cities where multiple cultures live and communicate together. This competition is an extension of the Robust Reading Competition (RRC) which has been held since 2003 both in ICDAR and in an online context. The proposed competition is presented as a new challenge of the RRC. The dataset built for this challenge largely extends the previous RRC editions in many aspects: the multi-lingual text, the size of the dataset, the multi-oriented text, the wide variety of scenes. The dataset is comprised of 18,000 images which contain text belonging to 9 languages. The challenge is comprised of three tasks related to text detection and script classification. We have received a total of 16 participations from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of this RRC-MLT challenge.

The widespread deployment of facial recognition-based biometric systems has made facial presentation attack detection (face anti-spoofing) an increasingly critical issue. This survey thoroughly investigates facial Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) methods that only require RGB cameras of generic consumer devices over the past two decades. We present an attack scenario-oriented typology of the existing facial PAD methods, and we provide a review of over 50 of the most influenced facial PAD methods over the past two decades till today and their related issues. We adopt a comprehensive presentation of the reviewed facial PAD methods following the proposed typology and in chronological order. By doing so, we depict the main challenges, evolutions and current trends in the field of facial PAD and provide insights on its future research. From an experimental point of view, this survey paper provides a summarized overview of the available public databases and an extensive comparison of the results reported in PAD-reviewed papers.

Smartphones are enabling new ways of capture, hence arises the need for seamless and reliable acquisition and digitization of documents, in order to convert them to editable, searchable and a more human-readable format. Current state-of-the-art works lack databases and baseline benchmarks for digitizing mobile captured documents. We have organized a competition for mobile document capture and OCR in order to address this issue. The competition is structured into two independent challenges: smartphone document capture, and smartphone OCR. This report describes the datasets for both challenges along with their ground truth, details the performance evaluation protocols which we used, and presents the final results of the participating methods. In total, we received 13 submissions: 8 for challenge-1, and 5 for challenge-2.

In the area of pattern recognition and pattern matching, the methods based on deep learning models have recently attracted several researchers by achieving magnificent performance. In this paper, we propose the use of the convolutional neural network to recognize the multifont offline Urdu handwritten characters in an unconstrained environment. We also propose a novel dataset of Urdu handwritten characters since there is no publicly-available dataset of this kind. A series of experiments are performed on our proposed dataset. The accuracy achieved for character recognition is among the best while comparing with the ones reported in the literature for the same task.

Recently, benefiting from the advances of the deep convolution neural networks (CNNs), significant progress has been made in the field of the face verification and face recognition. Specially, the performance of the FaceNet has overpassed the human level performance in terms of the accuracy on the datasets "Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW)" and "Youtube Faces in the Wild (YTF)". The triplet loss used in the FaceNet has proved its effectiveness for face verification. However, the number of the possible triplets is explosive when using a large scale dataset to train the model. In this paper, we propose a simple class-wise triplet loss based on the intra/inter-class distance metric learning which can largely reduce the number of the possible triplets to be learned. However the simplification of the classic triplet loss function has not degraded the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental evaluations on the most widely used benchmarks LFW and YTF show that the model with the proposed class-wise simple triplet loss can reach the state-of-the-art performance. And the visualization of the distribution of the learned features based on the MNIST dataset has also shown the effectiveness of the proposed method to better separate the classes and make the features more discriminative in comparison with the other state-of-the-art loss function.