ICFHR2016 Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition (H-KWS 2016)

The H-KWS 2016, organized in the context of the ICFHR 2016 conference aims at setting up an evaluation framework for benchmarking handwritten keyword spotting (KWS) examining both the Query by Example (QbE) and the Query by String (QbS) approaches. Both KWS approaches were hosted into two different tracks, which in turn were split into two distinct challenges, namely, a segmentation-based and a segmentation-free to accommodate different perspectives adopted by researchers in the KWS field. In addition, the competition aims to evaluate the submitted training-based methods under different amounts of training data. Four participants submitted at least one solution to one of the challenges, according to the capabilities and/or restrictions of their systems. The data used in the competition consisted of historical German and English documents with their own characteristics and complexities. This paper presents the details of the competition, including the data, evaluation metrics and results of the best run of each participating methods.