  Chinese is the most widely used language in the world. Algorithms that read
Chinese text in natural images facilitate applications of various kinds.
Despite the large potential value, datasets and competitions in the past
primarily focus on English, which bares very different characteristics than
Chinese. This report introduces RCTW, a new competition that focuses on Chinese
text reading. The competition features a large-scale dataset with 12,263
annotated images. Two tasks, namely text localization and end-to-end
recognition, are set up. The competition took place from January 20 to May 31,
2017. 23 valid submissions were received from 19 teams. This report includes
dataset description, task definitions, evaluation protocols, and results
summaries and analysis. Through this competition, we call for more future
research on the Chinese text reading problem. The official website for the
competition is http://rctw.vlrlab.net
