ICDAR 2011 - Arabic Recognition Competition: Multi-font Multi-size Digitally Represented Text

This paper describes the Arabic Recognition Competition: Multi-font Multi-size Digitally Represented Text held in the context of the 11^th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR2011), during September 18-21, 2011, Beijing, China. This first competition used the freely available Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database. Several research groups have started using the APTI database and this year, 2 groups with 3 systems are participating in the competition. The systems are compared using the recognition rates at the character and word levels. The systems were tested on one test dataset which is unknown to all participants (set 6 of APTI database). The systems are compared on the most important characteristic of classification systems, the recognition rate. A short description of the participating groups, their systems, the experimental setup, and the observed results are presented.