ICDAR 2009 Handwriting Segmentation Contest

The Handwriting Segmentation Contest was organized in the context of ICDAR2009 conference in order to record recent advances in off-line handwriting segmentation. This paper describes the contest details including the dataset, the ground truth and the evaluation criteria and presents the results of the 12 participating methods. The contest includes handwritten document images produced by many writers in several languages (English, French, German and Greek). These images are manually annotated in order to produce the ground truth which corresponds to the correct text line and word segmentation result. For the evaluation, a well established approach is used based on counting the number of matches between the entities detected by the segmentation algorithm and the entities in the ground truth.