IWFHR 2006 Tamil Handwritten OCR Competition

[Simon Lucas]

This is the first major competition involving hand-written Tamil
characters, and the first release of a public ground-truthed Tamil
dataset.

A particular challenge compared to other OCR datasets (e.g. such as
MNist), is the relatively high number of classes (156), and the
relatively low number of training samples per class.

The objective of the competition is to recognize 156 different classes
of handwritten Tamil 'characters'.
Participants should register for the competition at their earliest
convenience. Registration indicates an intention to enter rather than
a firm commitment.
Training data and subsequently test data for the problem will be
provided to registered participants in the following formats:
Online data in UNIPEN 1.0 format
Offline data as bi-level TIFF images derived from online data.

more details here:

http://algoval.essex.ac.uk:8080/iwfhr2006/index.jsp