ASAR 2021 Competition on Online Arabic Word Recognition

This paper presents the Online Arabic words recognition competition (OAWRC 2021) held at ASAR 2021 workshop in conjuction with ICDAR 2021. This competition uses the ADAB database, which is a database of Arabic handwritten words. Three groups with four systems are participating in the competition this year. A brief description of participating systems and the experimental results is doing. The systems were tested on unknown set to the participants of 100 labels. In particular, we wish to investigate and compare participating methods that can be robust against competition challenges. The main goal of this competition is to encourage the research in Arabic script and the development of Arabic handwritten systems. Within good recognition rate, the competition has two new challenges: working with small training set and being robust against noise. The evaluation process of participating systems adapts various metrics such as the recognition rate, the speed, etc. All systems produce good results. The winner and his runner-up are very close while they use different methods.