ICDAR 2005 Arabic handwriting recognition competition

This paper describes the Arabic handwriting recognition competition for ICDAR 2005. With the presentation of the IFN/ENIT-database in the year 2002 a database with handwritten Arabic town names was made available for free to non commercial research groups. Till now more than 30 groups are working with this data worldwide. By announcing a competition of Arabic handwriting recognition systems based on the IFN/ENIT-database, we hope to contribute to the development of Arabic handwriting recognition systems. The use of the same database by different research groups allows the comparison of different systems. We compare the systems on the most important characteristic: recognition rate, but also features like word length, writing style, and character connectivity will be discussed.