ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17)

TL;DR

This paper introduces the RCTW-17 competition, providing a large Chinese text dataset and evaluation framework to advance research in reading Chinese text in natural images, a less-explored area compared to English.

Contribution

It presents a new large-scale Chinese text dataset, defines tasks for text localization and recognition, and summarizes competition results to promote future research.

Findings

23 valid submissions from 19 teams

Evaluation protocols established for localization and recognition

Analysis of methods and results provided

Abstract

Chinese is the most widely used language in the world. Algorithms that read Chinese text in natural images facilitate applications of various kinds. Despite the large potential value, datasets and competitions in the past primarily focus on English, which bares very different characteristics than Chinese. This report introduces RCTW, a new competition that focuses on Chinese text reading. The competition features a large-scale dataset with 12,263 annotated images. Two tasks, namely text localization and end-to-end recognition, are set up. The competition took place from January 20 to May 31, 2017. 23 valid submissions were received from 19 teams. This report includes dataset description, task definitions, evaluation protocols, and results summaries and analysis. Through this competition, we call for more future research on the Chinese text reading problem. The official website for the competition is http://rctw.vlrlab.net