ICDAR 2024 Competition on Recognition and VQA on Handwritten Documents

This paper presents a competition report on the Recognition and Visual Question Answer on Handwritten Documents towards deeper understanding of handwritten multilingual documents (ICDAR 2024-HWD) held at the 18th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2024). Documents are in English or Indian Languages. Earlier editions related to recognition of Indian handwriting were held in conjunction with ICFHR 2022 and ICDAR 2023. A related DocVQA task was held in DAS 2020. This edition proposes three main tasks: Isolated Word Recognition (Task A), Page Level Recognition and Reading (Task B), and Visual Question Answers on Handwritten Documents (Task A). While Task A was already part of our previous competitions, we bring in new data as part of this edition. Task B and Task C are novel additions for this year. By attracting researchers with experience in printed and handwritten documents, we aim to establish benchmarks that significantly contribute to the academic literature in this field. A total of thirty-two teams around the world registered for this competition. Among them, only ten teams submitted their results along with algorithm details. The winning team, TSNUK, achieved an average 98.00% Character Recognition Rate (CRR) and 94.26% Word Recognition Rate (WRR) across four languages for Task A: Isolated Word Recognition. IndependentOCR excelled in Task B: Page Level Recognition and Reading, with 76.32% average Page Level Character Recognition Rate (PCRR) and 62.57% average Page Level Word Recognition Rate. The team PA_VCG won Task C: Visual Question Answering on Handwritten Documents with a 0.643 ANLS score.