CALL FOR COMPETITION: FEST @ ICDAR 2025

Competition on few-shot text line segmentation

https://ai4ch.uniud.it/FESTcompICDAR25/

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We are glad to announce FEST: Competition on FEw-Shot Text line segmentation of ancient handwritten documents (FEST), in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR 2025.

Competition Overview:

Text line segmentation is a crucial component of Document Image Analysis, particularly for ancient handwritten documents. It directly influences subsequent tasks like optical character recognition, layout analysis, and information extraction.

This competition challenges participants to develop systems capable of segmenting text lines using only three annotated images per manuscript for training. The dataset features a diverse collection of ancient manuscripts with varying layouts, levels of degradation, and non-standard formatting, reflecting real-world complexities. By focusing on few-shot learning, this competition aims to encourage the development of methods that can be readily applied by humanities scholars without the need for extensive manual annotation, fostering broader adoption of automated document analysis tools.

Competition Tasks:

We challenge the participants to perform the task of textline segmentation on the proposed dataset, U-DIADS-TL, in a few-shot setting, providing only three images, with their corresponding ground truths, as the training set for each of the three manuscripts comprising it.

Important Dates:

•        Registration Open: 10 December, 2024

•        Test set release to participants: 7 April, 2025

•        Deadline of the Competition: 20 April, 2025

•        Winner announcement: 30 June, 2025

For any additional information, please visit the website: https://ai4ch.uniud.it/FESTcompICDAR25/