ICFHR2016 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on the READ Dataset

Abstract

This paper describes the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) competition on the READ dataset that has been held in the context of the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition 2016. This competition aims to bring together researchers working on off-line HTR and provide them a suitable benchmark to compare their techniques on the task of transcribing typical historical handwritten documents. Two tracks with different conditions on the use of training data were proposed. Ten research groups registered in the competition but finally five submitted results. The handwritten images for this competition were drawn from the German document Ratsprotokolle collection composed of minutes of the council meetings held from 1470 to 1805, used in the READ project. The selected dataset is written by several hands and entails significant variabilities and difficulties. The five participants achieved good results with transcriptions word error rates ranging from 21% to 47%.