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.

翻译：读取印章标题文字是一项具有挑战性的任务，原因在于印章形状多变、文字弯曲、背景噪声以及文字重叠。然而，这一关键元素常见于官方和金融场景中，却在OCR技术领域未得到应有的重视。为促进该领域研究，我们组织了ICDAR 2023印章标题读取竞赛（ReST），包含两项任务：印章标题文字检测（任务1）和端到端印章标题识别（任务2）。我们构建了一个包含10000个真实印章数据的数据集，覆盖最常见的印章类别，并使用文字多边形和文字内容对所有印章标题文字进行标注。竞赛于2022年12月30日启动，2023年3月20日截止。竞赛吸引了来自学术界和工业界的53名参与者，其中任务1提交28份，任务2提交25份，显示出对这一挑战性任务的浓厚兴趣。本报告概述了竞赛的组织、挑战和结果。我们描述了数据集和任务，总结了提交情况和评估结果。结果表明，印章标题文字读取领域已取得重大进展，我们希望此次竞赛能激发OCR技术这一重要领域的进一步研究和发展。