ICDAR 2005 text locating competition results

This paper describes the results of the ICDAR 2005 competition for locating text in camera captured scenes. For this we used the same data as the ICDAR 2003 competition, which has been kept private until now. This allows a direct comparison with the 2003 entries. The main result is that the leading 2005 entry has improved significantly on the leading 2003 entry, with an increase in average f-score from 0.5 to 0.62, where the f-score is the same adapted information retrieval measure used for the 2003 competition. The paper also discusses the Web-based deployment and evaluation of text locating systems, and one of the leading entries has now been deployed in this way. This mode of usage could lead to more complete and more immediate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each newly developed system.