# ICDAR 2019 Historical Document Reading Challenge on Large Structured Chinese Family Records

## TL;DR

This paper introduces the ICDAR2019 Historical Document Reading Challenge focused on recognizing and analyzing large structured Chinese family records, aiming to advance layout analysis and text recognition in historical documents.

## Contribution

It presents a new benchmark and challenge dataset for layout and text recognition in large-scale Chinese historical documents.

## Key findings

- Development of a large Chinese historical document dataset
- Benchmarking of layout analysis and text recognition methods
- Encouragement of research in historical document understanding

## Abstract

We propose a Historical Document Reading Challenge on Large Chinese Structured Family Records, in short ICDAR2019 HDRC CHINESE. The objective of the proposed competition is to recognize and analyze the layout, and finally detect and recognize the textlines and characters of the large historical document collection containing more than 20 000 pages kindly provided by FamilySearch.