Overview
The "AERFAI Contest: Multilingual Handwritten Text Recognition" is organized in the framework of the AERFAI competition.
Nowadays, handwritten text recognition (HTR) in multiple languages represents a significant challenge in scientific research. This competition aims at encouraging competitors to create a single system capable of recognizing text in five different languages: English, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. Generally, HTR approaches have predominantly been oriented toward a single language. However, following the paradigm of automatic translation, this initiative aims to develop truly multilingual systems. This effort not only expands technological possibilities in HTR but also promises to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers in written communication.
The proposed contest consists of two tracks, with the aim of evaluating the perfomance of HTR systems under different conditions:
- T1 Restricted track: participants can only use the data provided by the organisers, in which systems must be trained from scratch.
- T2 Unrestricted track: participants are allowed to use external training data, including the use of pre-trained models.