ABSTRACT

Temporal order reconstruction from the off-line handwriting is a great challenge and a complicated task for researchers and developers, since dynamic information such as the temporal order of the pen trajectory can be useful for many systems, such as handwriting recognition system, writer identification and signature verification to help investigators detect falsified signatures and to simplify the document analyses task. Thus, the performance of online systems is more encouraging than offline systems. An overview of these methods is presented in [1, 2, 3]. Online Signal Restoration (OSR) is a real challenge depending to many factors such as limited assumptions about start/end points, ambiguous zone and double trace segments which give rise to a difficult decision for obtaining the right trajectory. In addition, the recovered signal must be described with dynamic features such as: the temporal order, the pen velocity, and the pen up/down. The challenge of the proposed competition is to recover the online script of Arabic Handwriting word, character and digit.

In order to encourage, to renew research in this context, and to compare the performance of different advances on OSR systems, we propose the ASAR2021 Competition on Arabic Handwriting word, character and digit. The results of this competition will be reported and presented in specific session at ASAR 2021.

 

Scientific Objectives

Handwriting signature reconstruction was proposed in ICDAR2013 [5]. For the best of our knowledge, no competition was organized before for Arabic Handwriting Recovery.

The objective of this competition is to make attention to Arabic Handwriting word recovery field and to measure the capacity of participated systems to recover the temporal order, pen velocity [2], and pen up/down of the off-line handwriting with the unpublished Handwriting Dhad dataset, in the scope of the ASAR 2021.

 

Modalities of the Evaluation

The Handwriting Dhad Dataset contains 2 samples for each isolated Arabic word characters and digit of 200 persons, presented in the form of image of the writing and its counterpart on-line signal. The dataset is decomposed as follow:

• Train = 40 writers * 390 ( samples ) * 2 = 31200

• Validation = 10 writers * 390 ( samples ) * 2 = 3900

• Test = 10 writers * 390 ( samples ) * 2 = 3900

The training database will be sent to participants in both forms. The executable of the submitted system must be submitted at a given date.

The recovery system is run from the command line as follows:

>Recoverysystem  input.txt  output.txt

The input .txt file contains the paths of the png image files to be recovered. For example:

D:\ASARcompet\recovery\im0.png
D:\ASARcompet\recovery\im1.png
D:\ASARcompet\recovery\im2.png

…..

The output file contains the trajectory of the recovered image and the x and y coordinates of its ordered skeleton pixels. The signal must contains the pen up/down feature for example:

" D:\ASARcompet\recovery\im0.png "

​

As proposed in [4], the evaluation metrics will be Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Dynamic Time Wrapping (DTW) measurements between the reconstructed skeleton signal and the original on-line signal.

The results of the competition will be presented in a special session at ASAR 2021.

 

How to Participate

To participate, it is necessary to follow these steps:

1 - Register your interest via Register_Link: https://forms.gle/AkY1cRG1o2fvC3mz9

The email subject contain "ASAR 2021: TR-AHR"

The email core contains:  name, institution and list of other members of your team.

→ Please indicate a full description of your system.

2- After registration, you can download the trained dataset.

3- make your system adaptable to the inquired input/output.

4- Submit your executable file to run it in a new dataset (test dataset).

5- Submit a full description of your system (maximum one A4 page).

The competition results will be announced at ASAR 2021.

 

Important Dates

The associated events of participants and its important dates are presented as follow:

- Registration opens from April  5th to May 31th, 2021

- Deadline for executable file submission: June 15th, 2021

- Deadline  submission of system description : June 15th, 2021

- Deadline for paper submission: 1juillet