ICDAR 2011 writer identification contest

first contest which is dedicated to record recent advances in the field of writer identification using established evaluation performance measures. The benchmarking dataset of the contest was created with the help of 26 writers that were asked to copy eight pages that contain text in several languages (English, French, German and Greek). This paper describes the contest details including the evaluation measures used as well as the performance of the 8 submitted methods along with a short description of each method