Results of the RIMES Evaluation Campaign for Handwritten Mail Processing

This paper presents the results of the second test phase of the RIMES evaluation campaign. The latter is the first large-scale evaluation campaign intended to all the key players of the handwritten recognition and document analysis communities. It proposes various tasks around recognition and indexing of handwritten letters such as those sent by postal mail or fax by individuals to companies or administrations. In this second evaluation test, automatic systems have been evaluated on three themes: layout analysis, handwriting recognition and writer identification. The databases used are part of the RIMES database of 5605 real mails completely annotated as well as secondary databases of isolated characters and handwritten words (250,000 snippets). The paper reports on protocols and gives the results obtained in the campaign.