ICDAR 2003 page segmentation competition

There is a significant need to objectively evaluate layout analysis (page segmentation and region classification) methods. This paper describes the Page Segmentation Competition (modus operandi, dataset and evaluation criteria) held in the context of ICDAR2003 and presents the results of the evaluation of the candidate methods. The main objective of the competition was to evaluate such methods using scanned documents from commonly-occurring publications. The results indicate that although methods seem to be maturing, there is still a considerable need to develop robust methods that deal with everyday documents.