  Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of
seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this
important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and
has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To
promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading
the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection
(Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a
dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals,
and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The
competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The
competition attracted 53 participants from academia and industry including 28
submissions for Task 1 and 25 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated
significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an
overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and
results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and
evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in
the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will
inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR
technology.
