ICDAR 2013 Competition on Historical Book Recognition (HBR 2013)

This paper presents an objective comparative evaluation of layout analysis and recognition methods for scanned historical books. It describes the competition (modus operandi, dataset and evaluation methodology) held in the context of ICDAR2013 and the 2nd International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP2013), presenting the results of the evaluation of five methods - three submitted and two state-of-the-art systems (one commercial and one open-source). Three scenarios are reported in this paper, one evaluating the ability of methods to accurately segment regions, one evaluating segmentation and region classification (with a text extraction goal) and the other the whole pipeline including recognition. The results indicate that there is a convergence to a certain methodology, in terms of layout analysis, with some variations in the approach. However, there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with the idiosyncrasies of historical books, especially for OCR.