ICDAR 2009 Handwriting Recognition Competition

This paper describes the handwriting recognition competition held at ICDAR 2009. This competition is based on the RIMES-database, with French written text documents.These document are classified in three different categories,complete text pages, words, and isolated characters. This year 10 systems were submitted for the handwritten recognition competition on snippets of French words. The systems were evaluated in three subtask depending of the sizes of the used dictionary. A comparison between different classification and recognition systems show interesting results. A short description of the participating groups, their systems,and the results achieved are presented.