ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multilingual Medieval Handwriting Recognition
The ICDAR 2026 Competition on Multilingual Medieval Handwriting Recognition (CMMHWR26) seeks to evaluate the state of the art in multilingual historical handwritten text recognition. Each of the three increasingly difficult tasks is designed to assess model generalization and robustness under conditions that reflect real-world retrodigitization workflows.
Task 1: Multilingual Recognition#
evaluates text recognition across medieval manuscripts written in different languages. For this task, contestants will receive a dataset containing manuscripts written in nine different languages, eight Romance and one Germanic. Evaluation will be performed on a test set containing material written in the same nine languages and similar in style to the furnished training set.
Task 2: Intra-language family generalization#
extends Task 1 by evaluating recognition of manuscripts written in a closely related (i.e. Romance) language that is not present in the training dataset. The target language will be disclosed with the start of the registration period, allowing participants to optimize their methods accordingly.
Task 3: Cross-language family generalization#
evaluates accuracy on historical material linguistically dissimilar to the languages present in the training dataset. The test set will consist of manuscripts with similar handwriting styles to the training set, written in a non-Romance European language undisclosed to the participants in advance.
Schedule#
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21 January 2026#
Competition opens
Start of registration period
Training data release -
21 March 2026#
Registration deadline for participants
Test data release -
3 April 2026#
Deadline for system results and short description of systems
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31 August - 2 September 2026#
Presentation of results at ICDAR 2026 in Vienna
Contact#
If you have any questions or concerns please send a message to cmmhwr26@inria.fr.
Organizers#
Agnes Boutreux (Centre for Medieval Studies, Toronto, Sorbonne University, Paris)
Bram Cars (Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society)
Thibault Clérice (ALMAnaCH, Inria, Paris)
Matthias Gille Levenson (University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines)
Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp)
Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH, Inria, Paris)
Ariane Pinche (CIHAM, Lyon)
Caroline Vandyck (University of Antwerp)
Malamatenia Vlachou (IRHT, École des Ponts - ParisTech, Paris)
Funding#
