Bi-modal Handwritten Text Recognition ICPR’10 Contest report

Handwritten text is generally captured through two main modalities: off-line and on-line. Each modality has advantages and disadvantages, but it seems clear that smart approaches to handwritten text recognition (HTR) should make use of both modalities in order to take advantage of the positive aspects of each one. A particularly interesting case where the need of this bi-modal processing arises is when an off-line text, written by some writer, is considered along with the online modality of the same text written by another writer. This happens, for example, in computer-assisted transcription of old documents, where on-line text can be used to interactively correct errors made by a main off-line HTR system. In order to develop adequate techniques to deal with this challenging bi-modal HTR recognition task, a suitable corpus is needed. We have collected such a corpus using data (word segments) from the publicly available off-line and on-line IAM data sets. In order to provide the Community with an useful corpus to make easy tests, and to establish baseline performance figures, we have proposed this handwritten bi-modal contest. Here is reported the results of the contest with two participants, one of them achieved a 0% classification error rate, whilst the other participant achieved an interesting 1.5%.