The ASAR 2018 Competition on Physical Layout Analysis of Scanned Arabic Books (PLA-SAB 2018)

Successful physical layout analysis (PLA) is a key factor in the performance of text recognizers and many other applications. PLA solutions for scanned Arabic documents are few and difficult to compare due to differences in methods, data, and evaluation metrics. To help evaluate the performance of recent Arabic PLA solutions, the ASAR 2018 Competition on Physical Layout Analysis (PLA) was organized. This paper presents the results of this competition. The competition focused on analyzing layouts for Arabic scanned book pages (SAB). PLA-SAB required solutions of two tasks: page-to-block segmentation and block text/non-text classification. In this paper we briefly describe the methods provided by participating teams, present their results for both tasks using the BCE-Arabic benchmarking dataset [1], and make an open call for continuous participation outside the context of ASAR 2018.