First International Newspaper Segmentation contest

This paper presents the results of the First International Newspaper Segmentation contest that was organized on the frame of ICDAR 2001 conference. The aim of this contest was to evaluate all existing algorithms for document image segmentation that can be applied to Newspaper page segmentation. We evaluated the performance of three different newspaper segmentation algorithms on tracing all basic entities that appear in newspaper pages from the beginning of the previous century up to the present. The selected entities are text regions, lines and images/drawings. Both training and test sets come from Greek and English newspapers. The performance evaluation method is based on counting the number of matches between the entities detected by the algorithms and the entities of the ground truth. In order to rank the global performance of each participant, we employed a metric that combines the average values of detection rate and recognition accuracy.