ICDAR 2003 Robust Reading Competitions

This paper describes the robust reading competitions for ICDAR 2003. With the rapid growth in research over the last few years on recognizing text in natural scenes, there is an urgent need to establish some common benchmark datasets, and gain a clear understanding of the current state of the art. We use the term robust reading to refer to text images that are beyond the capabilities of current commercial OCR packages. We chose to break down the robust reading problem into three sub-problems, and run competitions for each stage, and also a competition for the best overall system. The sub-problems we chose were text locating, character recognition and word recognition. By breaking down the problem in this way, we hope to gain a better understanding of the state of the art in each of the sub-problems. Furthermore, our methodology involves storing detailed results of applying each algorithm to each image in the data sets, allowing researchers to study in depth the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm. The text locating contest was the only one to have any entries. We report the results of this contest, and show cases where the leading algorithms succeed and fail.