ICDAR 2009 Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition

This paper describes the Online Arabic handwritingrecognition competition held at ICDAR 2009. This firstcompetition uses the ADAB-database with Arabic onlinehandwritten words. This year, 3 groups with 7 systems areparticipating in the competition. The systems were tested onknown data (sets 1 to 3) and on one test dataset which is unknownto all participants (set 4). The systems are comparedon the most important characteristic of classification systems,the recognition rate. Additionally, the relative speedof the different systems were compared. A short descriptionof the participating groups, their systems, the experimentalsetup, and the performed results are presented.