Tan Lu and Ann Dooms won the ICDAR 2019 competition in document recognition with complex layouts. There were 12 participants (representing state-of-the-art) including 9 methods and 3 (professional) software packages. The 9 methods are submitted from academic teams from different countries including India, China, France, Vietnam, Czech and Brussels (DIMA). The 3 software packages included two ABBYY FineReader engines (FRE 11 and FRE 12) and Google Tesseract 4. The ADOCHS method outperforms the others under all three scenarios, namely the « Segmentation + Classification », « Segmentation » and « Text Regions Only ». It also achieves lowest standard deviation across the evaluation set.
This award is a great recognition for the work of our Belgian universities and announces great prospects for the automation of quality control processes in digitization projects within heritage institutions! A big congratulations especially to Tan Lu, Ph.D student on the project, and to its promoter Ann Dooms!
