ICDAR 2011 - Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition

This paper describes the Arabic handwriting recognition competition held at International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2011. This fifth competition again used the IfN/ENIT-database with Arabic handwritten Tunisian town names. Today, more than 110 research groups from universities, research centers, and industry are working with this database worldwide. This year, 4 groups with 4 systems were participating in the competition. The systems were tested on known data (sets d and e) and on two data sets which are unknown to the participants (sets f and s). The systems were compared based on the most important characteristic: the recognition rate. A short description of the participating groups, their systems, and the results achieved are finally presented.