ICDAR 2024 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition in Brazilian Essays – BRESSAY

This paper describes the “Handwritten Text Recognition in Brazilian Essays – BRESSAY” competition, held at the 18th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2024). The competition aimed to advance Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) by addressing challenges specific to Brazilian Portuguese academic essays, such as diverse handwriting styles and document irregularities like smudges and erasures. Participants were encouraged to develop robust algorithms capable of accurately transcribing handwritten texts at line, paragraph, and page levels using the new BRESSAY dataset. The competition attracted 14 participants from different countries, with 4 research groups submitting a total of 11 proposals in the three challenges by the end of the competition. These proposals achieved impressive recognition rates and demonstrated advancements over traditional baseline models by using key strategies such as preprocessing techniques, synthetic data approaches, and advanced deep learning models. The evaluation metrics used were Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER), with error rates reaching up to 2.88% CER and 9.39% WER for line-level recognition, 3.75% CER and 10.48% WER for paragraph-level recognition, and 3.77% CER and 10.08% WER for page-level recognition. The competition highlight the potential for continued improvements in HTR and underscore the BRESSAY dataset as a resource for future researches. The dataset is available in the repository ( https://github.com/arthurflor23/handwritten-text-recognition ).