Overview of the ICDAR 2013 Competition on Book Structure Extraction

This paper summarizes the 3rd Book Structure Extraction competition that was run at the ICDAR 2013. Its goal is to evaluate and compare automatic techniques for deriving structure information from digitized books, which could then be used to aid navigation inside the books. More specifically, the task that participants are faced with is to construct hyperlinked tables of contents for a collection of 1,000 digitized books. This paper reviews the setup of the competition, the book collection used in the task, and the measures used for the evaluation. The main novelty of the 2013 competition is that we were able to rely on an external provider for the ground truthing phase, hence granting the consistency of the evaluation. In addition, this allowed us to nearly double the number of annotated books from the 1,040 books annotated in 2009 and 2011 to over 2,000 books. The paper further presents the resulting performance of the 6 participating research teams, and briefly summarizes their approaches.