I. Introduction
This paper describes the third edition of the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) contest organized for the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) 2016 in the framework of the EU TRANSCRIP-TORIUM project [1] the first two editions [2], [3], and now in the framework of the EU READ project
http://read.transkribus.eu/
. As previous editions, the goal of this contest was to bring together researchers for sharing new techniques and ideas on HTR for historical documents. A dataset used in the READ project was prepared for the participants and some challenges were defined for this dataset.