ICDAR 2021 Competition on Historical Map Segmentation

• Published in: arXiv.org 2021-05
• Main Authors: Chazalon, Joseph, Carlinet, Edwin, Chen, Yizi, Perret, Julien, Duménieu, Bertrand, Mallet, Clément, Géraud, Thierry, Nguyen, Vincent, Nguyen, Nam, Baloun, Josef, Lenc, Ladislav, Král, Pavel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Competition; Hough transformation; Image segmentation; Shape recognition; Task complexity; Template matching
• ISSN: 2331-8422

This paper presents the final results of the ICDAR 2021 Competition on Historical Map Segmentation (MapSeg), encouraging research on a series of historical atlases of Paris, France, drawn at 1/5000 scale between 1894 and 1937. The competition featured three tasks, awarded separately. Task~1 consists in detecting building blocks and was won by the L3IRIS team using a DenseNet-121 network trained in a weakly supervised fashion. This task is evaluated on 3 large images containing hundreds of shapes to detect. Task~2 consists in segmenting map content from the larger map sheet, and was won by the UWB team using a U-Net-like FCN combined with a binarization method to increase detection edge accuracy. Task~3 consists in locating intersection points of geo-referencing lines, and was also won by the UWB team who used a dedicated pipeline combining binarization, line detection with Hough transform, candidate filtering, and template matching for intersection refinement. Tasks~2 and~3 are evaluated on 95 map sheets with complex content. Dataset, evaluation tools and results are available under permissive licensing at \url{https://icdar21-mapseg.github.io/}.