  Chinese scene text reading is one of the most challenging problems in
computer vision and has attracted great interest. Different from English text,
Chinese has more than 6000 commonly used characters and Chinesecharacters can
be arranged in various layouts with numerous fonts. The Chinese signboards in
street view are a good choice for Chinese scene text images since they have
different backgrounds, fonts and layouts. We organized a competition called
ICDAR2019-ReCTS, which mainly focuses on reading Chinese text on signboard.
This report presents the final results of the competition. A large-scale
dataset of 25,000 annotated signboard images, in which all the text lines and
characters are annotated with locations and transcriptions, were released. Four
tasks, namely character recognition, text line recognition, text line detection
and end-to-end recognition were set up. Besides, considering the Chinese text
ambiguity issue, we proposed a multi ground truth (multi-GT) evaluation method
to make evaluation fairer. The competition started on March 1, 2019 and ended
on April 30, 2019. 262 submissions from 46 teams are received. Most of the
participants come from universities, research institutes, and tech companies in
China. There are also some participants from the United States, Australia,
Singapore, and Korea. 21 teams submit results for Task 1, 23 teams submit
results for Task 2, 24 teams submit results for Task 3, and 13 teams submit
results for Task 4. The official website for the competition is
http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=12.
