ICDAR2009 handwriting segmentation contest

ICDAR 2009 Handwriting Segmentation Contest was organized in the context of ICDAR2009 conference in order to record recent advances in off-line handwriting segmentation. 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. 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 as well as of two state-of-the-art algorithms. A description of the winning algorithms is also given.