Papers › End-to-End Page-Level Assessment of Handwritten Text Recognition
End-to-End Page-Level Assessment of Handwritten Text Recognition
Enrique Vidal, Alejandro H. Toselli, Antonio Ríos-Vila, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza
The evaluation of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems has traditionally used metrics based on the edit distance between HTR and ground truth (GT) transcripts, at both the character and word levels. This is very adequate when the experimental protocol assumes that both GT and HTR text lines are the same, which allows edit distances to be independently computed to each given line. Driven by recent advances in pattern recognition, HTR systems increasingly face the end-to-end page-level transcription of a document, where the precision of locating the different text lines and their corresponding reading order (RO) play a key role. In such a case, the standard metrics do not take into account the inconsistencies that might appear. In this paper, the problem of evaluating HTR systems at the page level is introduced in detail. We analyse the convenience of using a two-fold evaluation, where the transcription accuracy and the RO goodness are considered separately. Different alternatives are proposed, analysed and empirically compared both through partially simulated and through real, full end-to-end experiments. Results support the validity of the proposed two-fold evaluation approach. An important conclusion is that such an evaluation can be adequately achieved by just two simple and well-known metrics: the Word Error Rate (WER), that takes transcription sequentiality into account, and the here re-formulated Bag of Words Word Error Rate (bWER), that ignores order. While the latter directly and very accurately assess intrinsic word recognition errors, the difference between both metrics gracefully correlates with the Normalised Spearman's Foot Rule Distance (NSFD), a metric which explicitly measures RO errors associated with layout analysis flaws.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections