ICDAR 2019 CROHME + TFD: Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions and Typeset Formula Detection

Mahshad Mahdavi (1) , Richard Zanibbi (1) , Harold Mouchère (2, 3) , Christian Viard-Gaudin (2, 3) , Utpal Garain (4)

1 RIT - Department of Computer Science
2 LS2N - Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes
3 LS2N - équipe IPI - Image Perception Interaction
4 Indian Statistical Institute [Kolkata]

We summarize the tasks, protocol, and outcome for the 6th Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME), which includes a new formula detection in document images task (+ TFD). For CROHME + TFD 2019, participants chose between two tasks for recognizing handwritten formulas from 1) online stroke data, or 2) images generated from the handwritten strokes. To compare L A T E X strings and the labeled directed trees over strokes (label graphs) used in previous CROHMEs, we convert LATEX and stroke-based label graphs to label graphs defined over symbols (symbol-level label graphs, or symLG). More than thirty (33) participants registered for the competition, with nineteen (19) teams submitting results. The strongest formula recognition results were produced by the USTC-iFLYTEK research team, for both stroke-based (81%) and image-based (77%) input. For the new typeset formula detection task, the Samsung R&D Institute Ukraine (Team 2) obtained a very strong F-score (93%). System performance has improved since the last CROHME-still, the competition results suggest that recognition of handwritten formulae remains a difficult structural pattern recognition task.

Mots clés: mathematical expression recognition; handwriting recognition; formula detection; performance evaluation

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Réseau de neurones [cs.NE]; Apprentissage [cs.LG]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Mahshad Mahdavi, Richard Zanibbi, Harold Mouchère, Christian Viard-Gaudin, Utpal Garain. ICDAR 2019 CROHME + TFD: Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions and Typeset Formula Detection. 15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2019), Sep 2019, Sydney, Australia. ⟨hal-02296268⟩