ICDAR 2011 Writer Identification Contest

Writer identification is a behavioural handwriting-based recognition modality which proceeds by matching unknown handwritings against a database of samples with known authorship and it is considered today as a hot and promising topic of research. Therefore, writer identification recently has been studied and it has a wide variety of applications, such as security, financial activity, forensic and used as access control. Especially, analysis of handwritten documents has great bearing on the criminal justice systems.

In this first international writer identification contest, the general objective is to record recent advances in the field of writer identification using established evaluation performance measures. We plan to create a benchmarking dataset of binary handwritten document images and use a common evaluation methodology in order to test and compare the submitted algorithms for writer identification. These documents are written in four languages (English, Greek, French, and German). Part of this dataset (experimental dataset) will be provided to the contest participants just after registering.

We invite all researchers in the field of Writer Identification to register and participate in ICDAR2011 Writer Identification Contest. An agreement will be signed by the participants and the organizers in order to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the submitted software. The description of the methods and the evaluation scores will be presented during a dedicated ICDAR2011 contest session. A report on the competition will be published in the ICDAR2011 conference proceedings.