ICDAR2015 Competition on Keyword Spotting for Handwritten Documents

The principal goal of the Competition on Keyword Spotting for Handwritten Documents was to promote different approaches used in the field of Keyword Spotting and to fairly compare them using uniform data and metrics. To accommodate different perspectives adopted by researches in this field, the competition was divided into two distinct tracks, namely, a training-free and a training-based track, and each track entailed two optional assignments. Six participants submitted solutions to one or both assignments, depending on the capabilities and/or restrictions of their systems. The data used in the competition consisted of historical documents in English with different levels of complexity. This paper presents the details of the competition, including the data, evaluation metrics and results of the best participant methods.