International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2010) - Competitions Overview

The great success and high number of participants in pattern recognition related competitions last years show an important improvement of recognition and classification approaches. This success is unconceivable without the availability of huge datasets of real world data. We have invited for proposals for competitions to be held in the framework of the 12th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR2010). These competitions should aim at evaluating the performance of algorithms and methods for a particular task of Handwriting Recognition. Eight different teams composed of more than one group have submitted their proposals. The subjects of these propositions cover the field of research of handwriting recognition from pre-processing over handwritten document analysis to handwriting text/word recognition. These competitions represent an overview of current research topics and frontiers in handwriting document analysis and recognition. Only 5 competitions have received enough participants (we have defined the threshold to 3 systems) to present their evaluation at the ICFHR 2010. This paper presents the 8 competition proposals with lists of competition organizers and lists of participating systems and approaches.