OCR competition (first announcement)

[Lucas, Simon M]

 Dear All,

 I would like to draw your attention to
 an OCR contest that we intend to run in the
 near future.  This will be sponsored by the
 Post Office (UK) who intend to contribute
 a modest prize for the winner - but the
 intention is also to give developers useful
 feedback on how their algorithms compare with
 other ones on a range of OCR datasets and a
 range of different criteria.

 Currently, all submissions must be in Java,
 either in the form of an archive of class
 files (jar, zip or gzip etc) or a single
 body of source code.  

 The problem set up is described on Algoval:

  http://algoval.essex.ac.uk

 Follow link to problems then to Trainable OCR.
 
 We have yet to decide the exact criteria
 for winning, but will likely be based on
 a combination of accuracy, speed and memory
 considerations - this will be some function
 of the performance criteria that are already
 mentioned on the web page.

 The intention is to run the competition in
 October of this year.  This announcement is
 to give researchers chance to comply with
 the interface for the problem.

 If you wish to have solutions in languages
 other than Java considered, please send me
 a brief email to this effect.  I don't think
 this will be possible for this competition,
 but if I get a strong enough response I'll
 increase the priority of allowing other-language
 submissions in the future.

 Best regards,

   Simon Lucas


ps.  After Thursday 24th August I'm away for two weeks,
     so I may be a bit slow responding to your
     emails.


------------------------------------------------
Dr. Simon Lucas
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computer Science
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom

http://algoval.essex.ac.uk
Email:  sml at essex.ac.uk
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