Abstract: Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot/Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI.

Abstract: Recently, video text detection, tracking and recognition in natural scenes are becoming very popular in the computer vision community. However, most existing algorithms and benchmarks focus on common text cases (e.g., normal size, density) and single scenario, while ignore extreme video texts challenges, i.e., dense and small text in various scenarios. In this competition report, we establish a video text reading benchmark, named DSText, which focuses on dense and small text reading challenge in the video with various scenarios. Compared with the previous datasets, the proposed dataset mainly include three new challenges: 1) Dense video texts, new challenge for video text spotter. 2) High-proportioned small texts. 3) Various new scenarios, e.g., ‘Game’, ‘Sports’, etc. The proposed DSText includes 100 video clips from 12 open scenarios, supporting two tasks (i.e., video text tracking (Task 1) and end-to-end video text spotting (Task2)). During the competition period (opened on 15th February, 2023 and closed on 20th March, 2023), a total of 24 teams participated in the three proposed tasks with around 30 valid submissions, respectively. In this article, we describe detailed statistical information of the dataset, tasks, evaluation protocols and the results summaries of the ICDAR 2023 on DSText competition. Moreover, we hope the benchmark will promise the video text research in the community.

Abstract: In this report, we present the final results of the ICDAR 2023 Competition on RoadText Video Text Detection, Tracking and Recognition. The RoadText challenge is based on the RoadText-1K dataset and aims to assess and enhance current methods for scene text detection, recognition, and tracking in videos. The RoadText-1K dataset contains 1000 dash cam videos with annotations for text bounding boxes and transcriptions in every frame. The competition features an end-to-end task, requiring systems to accurately detect, track, and recognize text in dash cam videos. The paper presents a comprehensive review of the submitted methods along with a detailed analysis of the results obtained by the methods. The analysis provides valuable insights into the current capabilities and limitations of video text detection, tracking, and recognition systems for dashcam videos.

Abstract: Scene text detection and recognition is a crucial task in computer vision with numerous real-world applications. Transformer-based approaches are behind all current state-of-the-art models and have achieved excellent performance. However, the computational requirements of the transformer architecture makes training these methods slow and resource heavy. In this paper, we introduce a new token pruning strategy that significantly decreases training and inference times without sacrificing performance, striking a balance between accuracy and speed. We have applied this pruning technique to our own end-to-end transformer-based scene text understanding architecture. Our method uses a separate detection branch to guide the pruning of uninformative image features, which significantly reduces the number of tokens at the input of the transformer. Experimental results show how our network is able to obtain competitive results on multiple public benchmarks while running at significantly higher speeds.

Abstract: Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: this https URL

Abstract: Following previous series on Looking at People (LAP) competitions [14, 13, 11, 12, 2], in 2015 ChaLearn ran two new competitions within the field of Looking at People: (1) age estimation, and (2) cultural event recognition, both in
still images. We developed a crowd-sourcing application to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). In terms of cultural event recognition, one hundred categories had to be recognized. These
tasks involved scene understanding and human body analysis. This paper summarizes both challenges and data, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competition.

Abstract: We analyze the results of the 2017 ChaLearn Looking at People Challenge at ICCV. The challenge comprised three tracks: (1) large-scale isolated (2) continuous gesture recognition, and (3) real versus fake expressed emotions tracks. It is the second round for both gesture recognition challenges, which were held first in the context of the ICPR 2016 workshop on “multimedia challenges beyond visual analysis”. In this second round, more participants joined the competitions, and the performances considerably improved compared to the first round. Particularly, the best recognition accuracy of isolated gesture recognition has improved from 56.90% to 67.71% in the IsoGD test set, and Mean Jaccard Index (MJI) of continuous gesture recognition has improved from 0.2869 to 0.6103 in the ConGD test set. The third track is the first challenge on real versus fake expressed emotion classification, including six emotion categories, for which a novel database was introduced. The first place was shared between two teams who achieved 67.70% averaged recognition rate on the test set. The data of the three tracks, the participants' code and method descriptions are publicly available to allow researchers to keep making progress in the field.