-- Creator: TopCoder, Inc.
-- Released under Apache License, Version 2.0
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

Data Set Information:

USPTO Algorithm Challenge, run by NASA-Harvard Tournament Lab and TopCoder
  Problem: Patent Labeling

Attribute Information:

Dataset Information:
   -- This folder contains 4 groups of USPTO patent images including ground truth information.
-- The 4 groups are 'train1', 'train2', 'test', 'evaluation'.
-- 'train1', 'test', 'evaluation' contains data in the original 'USPTO Algorithm Challenge' for training, testing and final evaluation, respectively.
-- 'train2' contains additional data which was used in the 'USPTO Algorithm Followup Challenge.'  
  Notice that 'train2' includes some cover page images of patent document which is not included in other groups.

   -- In each group, there are two folders contain original images and corresponding ground truth informations.
-- The original images are in 'jpeg' format.
-- There are two types of ground truth: figure label ground truth and part label ground truth.
-- The ground truth files are text files with '.ans' extension.

   -- The structure of the ground truth files are described as below:
-- The first line is one number indicating how many instances exist in corresponding image
-- The following lines are polygon coordinates and corresponding label contents, each line corresponds to a figure label or part label, in the form 'N x1 y1 x2 y2 a€| xN yN x1 y1 content'.
-- In each of those lines, the first number N indicates how many polygon vertices are recorded in current instance.
-- The following numbers are x, y coordinates of those vertices.
-- The final word in each line is the content of figure label or part label.

Relevant Papers:

Christoph Riedl, Richard Zanibbi, Marti A. Hearst, Siyu Zhu, Michael Minetti, Jason Crusan, Ivan Metelsky, and Karim R. Lakhani, 'Detecting Figures and Part Labels in Patents: A
Competition-based Development of Image Processing Algorithms', working paper, [Web link].

Citation Request:

Christoph Riedl, Richard Zanibbi, Marti A. Hearst, Siyu Zhu, Michael Minetti, Jason Crusan, Ivan Metelsky, and Karim R. Lakhani, 'Detecting Figures and Part Labels in Patents: A Competition-based Development of Image Processing Algorithms,' International Journal on document Analysis and Recognition, 1-18, DOI 10.1007/s10032-016-0260-8