Now

• The labels for Test_A and Test_B are now available at Google Drive.

Update (March 31, 2024)

• The images of Test_B are available at Google Drive. The submission channel of Test_B is open at CodaLab.

• The final ranking is based on the results of Test_B. The competition will end at 23:59:59 UTC on March 31st.

• When the competition ends, the top three teams are supposed to submit the technical report and source code (including checkpoints) within one week. Once any cheating is discovered, the corresponding team will be disqualified from the competition.

News (Important) 

• The images of Test_A are available at Google Drive. The submission channel of Test_A is open at CodaLab.

• The competition schedule has been extended, and the first phase has been postponed to 24:00 on March 30.

• The submission format has been changed from json to txt. Details can be found in the Task Section.

Introduction 

Artistic text is widely used in advertisements, slogans, exhibitions, decorations, magazines, and books. However, artistic text recognition is an overlooked and extremely challenging task with importance and practicability in various applications. Artistic text recognition often has several challenges such as the various appearances with special-designed fonts and effects, the complex connections and overlaps between characters, and the severe interference from background patterns. Therefore, we organize this competition to invite participants to solve these challenges. We hope that the dataset and task could greatly promote the research in text recognition.

Quick start guide 

• Download the training dataset via this link.

• Register to participate by sending an email to xdxie@hust.edu.cn.

• Submit your entry via the competition server CodaLab-ICDAR24-WordArt.

Registration  

We use CodaLab for submissions. The site for the submission will be ready before March 10. To register, please send an email to xdxie@hust.edu.cn, otherwise the submission is invalid.

Please include the following information in your email:

•  Names of participants and the corresponding usernames in CodaLab

•  The username in CodaLab for submission

•  Affiliation of participants

•  Team Name

Task

The aim of this task is to accurately recognize text content from artistic text images.

Input: Artistic text images shown in Fig. 1.

Output: The text strings corresponding to the images.

Evaluation Protocols: We only use the word recognition accuracy (WRA) as the artistic text recognition evaluation protocol. WRA is defined by WRA=Wr/W, where W is the total number of words, and Wr represents the number of correctly recognized words ignoring the case and symbols.

Submission Format: Participants will be asked to submit a single txt file (answer.txt) containing results for all test images. This txt file should be directly compressed into a zip file before uploading to CodaLab. The results format in txt is: 

test_image\new0.png sarcasvh

test_image\new1.png harrington

……

Competition Schedule 

• January 10, 2024: Competition websites are live. Training images and ground truth are available.

• March 10, 2024: The images of Test_A are available. The submission channel of Test_A is open.

• March 30, 2024: The submission channel of Test_A is closed. The top-10 teams advance to the finals of Test_B.

• March 31, 2024: The images of Test_B are available. The submission channel of Test_B is open.

• March 31, 2024: The submission channel of Test_B is closed. The final ranking is based on the results of Test_B.

• April 1, 2024: Declaration of results online.

Competition Rules 

The competition is open for participants from both industry and academia. Below we describe the tentative rules for our competition:

• Participants can use publicly released datasets (synthetic or real) to train models, but cannot use private data in any phase of the competition. Participants cannot use publicly available pre-trained models.

• Each participant team can include up to a maximum of 5 people from one or more affiliations.

• One person can only participate on one team. Mentors included. No exceptions.

•  Any cheating will result in disqualification, including submitting manual labeling results and registering with false information.

Leaderboard 

• See the competition page for the leaderboard: CodaLab-ICDAR24-WordArt.

Contact 

• Please contact xdxie@hust.edu.cn or lingerdeng2023@163.com if you have further questions.

Organizers

Xudong Xie, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, xdxie@hust.edu.cn

Ling'er Deng, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, lingerdeng2023@163.com

Zhifei Zhang, Adobe Research, zzhang@adobe.com

Zhaowen Wang, Adobe Research, zhawang@adobe.com

Yuliang Liu, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ylliu@hust.edu.cn