ICDAR2005 page segmentation competition

There is an established need for objective evaluation of layout analysis methods, in realistic circumstances. This paper describes the page segmentation competition (modus operandi, dataset and evaluation criteria) held in the context of ICDAR2005 and presents the results of the evaluation of four candidate methods. The main objective of the competition was to compare the performance of such methods using scanned documents from commonly-occurring publications. The results indicate that although methods seem to be maturing, there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with everyday documents.