This paper introduces a new offline handwriting database that was developed to be employed in performance evaluation, result comparison and development of new methods related to handwriting analysis and recognition. The database can particularly be used for signature verification, writer recognition and writer demographics classification. In addition, the database also supports isolated digit recognition, digit/text segmentation and recognition and similar related tasks. The database comprises 600 Arabic and 600 French text samples, 1300 signatures and 21,000 digits. 100 Algerian individuals coming from different age groups and educational backgrounds contributed to the development of database by providing a total of 1300 forms. The database is also accompanied with ground truth data supporting the evaluation of the aforementioned tasks. The main contribution of the database is providing a multi-script platform where same authors contributed samples in French and Arabic. It would be interesting to explore applications like writer recognition and writer demographics classification in a multi-script environment.

This competition targets writer identification and gender classification from offline handwritten documents using the QUWI database. The most interesting aspect of the competition is the use of a dataset with writing samples of the same individual in Arabic as well as English. The competition not only allows an objective comparison of different systems but also permits to investigate the performance of traditional script-dependent systems in a multi-script experimental setup. This paper describes the competition details including the competition tasks, the database employed, the methods used by the participating systems, evaluation and ranking criteria and the overall rankings of the participants. The competition received a total of 13 submissions from 8 different institutions. Writer identification tasks received 5 while the gender classification tasks received 8 submissions.