Historical manuscripts constitute a tremendous source of information about the history of mankind over ancient eras. Information preserved in historical manuscripts is a valuable source for studying and analyzing ancient civilizations. They are indispensable for acquiring immanent knowledge about their political, social, scientific, and cultural heritage. Nowadays, countless ancient manuscripts have been digitalized and made publicly or commercially accessible for further analysis. Actually, this contributed to the emergence and rapid development of several computer-based techniques for the automatic analysis of historical manuscripts.

The study of the literature showed an increasing interest in the automatic analysis of ancient manuscripts [1,2]. Particularly, the accurate and concise identification of the age of historical manuscripts, or historical manuscript dating, is a first and essential step for understanding the historical contexts and deriving valuable, trustful, and consistent information through thoroughly analyzing their contents. However, this is known to be a challenging task. Traditional paleographic approaches used for ancient manuscript dating require extensive intervention of experts and are known to be costly, time-inefficient, and critical due to the fragility of physical materials used for preserving the writings. Automatic manuscript dating techniques provide alternative tools that overcome the traditional approaches’ challenges and speed up the process.

With the presence of several computer-based techniques for historical manuscript dating, we propose the organization of this edition of the historical manuscript dating competition that specifically focuses on ancient Arabic manuscripts (HAMD 22). The competition will be organized in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2022). Through the competition, we aim to objectively evaluate existing algorithms and systems with regard to a diverse, rich, and reasonable-sized dataset.

The competition is a valuable opportunity for researchers in the field to compare the performance of their historical Arabic manuscript dating systems on a common and well-established dataset and under a strict evaluation process. A detailed report with the obtained results from all the contributions will be published in the proceedings of the ICFHR 2022 conference. The report will include comprehensive descriptions and rankings of the participating systems. The report will also identify and discuss the limitations of each system and highlight potential gaps in the field. The results described in the report will be presented in a dedicated session at the ICFHR 2022 conference (please visit http://icfhr2022.org/index.php for more details).