RIMES evaluation campaign for handwritten mail processing

The paper presents the French RIMES (Reconnaissance et Indexation de donnees Manuscrites et de fac similES / Recognition and Indexing of handwritten documents and faxes) project, which is an evaluation campaign dedicated to automatic systems of recognition and indexing of handwritten letters such as those sent by postal mail or fax by individuals to companies or administrations. This project is intended to all the key players of the handwritten recognition and document analysis fields by proposing them to participate to evaluation tests, a first test having taken already place. In this framework, a new database of more than 5600 real mails completely annotated have been created as well as secondary databases of isolated characters, handwritten words (300 000 snippets) and logos. Beyond the evaluation, the other contribution of the RIMES project is to make available all these databases to the community after the last test