ICDAR 2024 Competition on Recognition of Chemical Structures

Mingjun Chen, Hao Wu, Qikai Chang, Hanbo Cheng, Jiefeng Ma, Pengfei Hu, Zhenrong Zhang, Chenyu Liu, Changpeng Pi, Jinshui Hu, Baocai Yin, Bing Yin, Cong Liu, Jun Du

Abstract: The recognition of chemical molecular structures is crucial in fields such as education and biochemistry. Due to the significant challenges in data acquisition and annotation, current methods mainly focus on recognizing printed structures with clean backgrounds, with limited research devoted to handwritten chemical molecular structure recognition. This disparity arises because researchers can readily obtain extensive, clean-printed structure datasets through rendering tools, whereas authentic handwritten chemical structure data and corresponding benchmarks are scarce. To prompt research in this field, we have organized a new competition aimed at the recognition of genuine handwritten chemical structures. The competition ran from January 10 to April 25, 2024, receiving five valid submissions. In this report, we provide detailed information about the data, tasks, methods of the participating teams, and a summary and discussion of the submitted results.