ICDAR 2009 Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competition

This paper describes the Online Arabic handwriting recognition competition held at ICDAR 2009. This first competition uses the ADAB-database with Arabic online handwritten words. This year, 3 groups with 7 systems are participating in the competition. The systems were tested on known data (sets 1 to 3) and on one test dataset which is unknown to all participants (set 4). The systems are compared on the most important characteristic of classification systems,the recognition rate. Additionally, the relative speed of the different systems were compared. A short description of the participating groups, their systems, the experimental setup, and the performed results are presented.