The NicIcon Database of Handwritten Icons for Crisis Management

The goal of this paper is to announce the NicIcon collection of handwritten sketches containing iconic gestures. These data have recently been collected in our group with the goal to develop and assess pen input recognition technologies for the domain of crisis management. In our envisaged scenarios, users can use the pen to enter, e.g., information about the location of certain objects or the occurrence of certain events, on a depicted photograph or digital map. Typically, these sketches contain representations of drawings that are not contained in publicly available databases, which mainly contain handwritten texts. We report on our classification performances achieved for these data and make the data freely available to the handwriting recognition community.