Abstract: The combination of the output of classifiers has been one of the strategies used to improve classification rates in general purpose classification systems. Some of the most common approaches can be explained using the Bayes' formula. In this paper, we tackle the problem of the combination of classifiers using a non-Bayesian probabilistic framework. This approach permits us to derive two linear combination rules that minimize misclassification rates under some constraints on the distribution of classifiers. In order to show the validity of this approach we have compared it with other popular combination rules from a theoretical viewpoint using a synthetic data set, and experimentally using two standard databases: the MNIST handwritten digit database and the GREC symbol database. Results on the synthetic data set show the validity of the theoretical approach. Indeed, results on real data show that the proposed methods outperform other common combination schemes.

Abstract: With the growing cosmopolitan culture of modern cities, the need of robust Multi-Lingual scene Text (MLT) detection and recognition systems has never been more immense. With the goal to systematically benchmark and push the state-of-the-art forward, the proposed competition builds on top of the RRC-MLT-2017 with an additional end-to-end task, an additional language in the real images dataset, a large scale multi-lingual synthetic dataset to assist the training, and a baseline End-to-End recognition method. The real dataset consists of 20,000 images containing text from 10 languages. The challenge has 4 tasks covering various aspects of multi-lingual scene text: (a) text detection, (b) cropped word script classification, (c) joint text detection and script classification and (d) end-to-end detection and recognition. In total, the competition received 60 submissions from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of the presented RRC-MLT-2019 challenge.

Abstract: This paper reports the ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT that consists of three major challenges: i) scene text detection, ii) scene text recognition, and iii) scene text spotting. A total of 78 submissions from 46 unique teams/individuals were received for this competition. The top performing score of each challenge is as follows: i) T1 – 82.65%, ii) T2.1 – 74.3%, iii) T2.2 – 85.32%, iv) T3.1 – 53.86%, and v) T3.2 – 54.91%. Apart from the results, this paper also details the ArT dataset, tasks description, evaluation metrics and participants' methods. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the use of Relative Location Features (RLF) on a historical document segmentation task, and compare the quality of the results obtained on structured and unstructured documents using RLF and not using them. We prove that using these features improve the final segmentation on documents with a strong structure, while their application on unstructured documents does not show significant improvement. Although this paper is not focused on segmenting unstructured documents, results obtained on a benchmark dataset are equal or even overcome previous results of similar works.

Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.