Outstanding Achievements

ICDAR recognizes a scholar that has made extraordinary contributions to the field of document analysis and recognition during their career.

An ICDAR Award Program has been established to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Document Analysis and Recognition in one or more of the following areas:

  • Research
  • Training of students
  • Research/Industry interaction
  • Service to the Profession

Every two years, two awards categories are presented. Namely, the Outstanding Achievement Award and the Young Researcher Award (less than 40 years old at the time the award is made). Each award consists of a token gift and a suitably inscribed certificate. The recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award is also invited to deliver the Opening Keynote Speech at ICDAR.

A call for nominations is circulated by TC10 and TC11 about six months before an ICDAR takes place.



2021 Lausanne, Switzerland

Dr. Masaki Nakagawa
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for his outstanding contributions in online handwriting beyond the Latin Alphabet, early integration of handwriting recognition in practically useful systems, and his excellent contributions for the ICDAR community, connecting us with Industry in Asia.

2019 Sydney, Australia

Prof. Andreas Dengel
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for contributions in semantic technologies applied to reading systems, the impact of his innovative solutions in the socio-economic sectors, and his leadership and strategic vision of the document analysis community.

2017 Kyoto, Japan

Prof. Rangachar Kasturi
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for seminal research in document image analysis and graphics recognition shaping the evolution of the document image analysis field, and for outstanding leadership to both the ICDAR and the wider international pattern recognition community.

2015 Nancy, France

Prof. Venu Govindaraju
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for pioneering contributions to pattern recognition and its application to the fields of handwriting recognition, multilingual document analysis, and biometrics; and for the development of real-time engineered systems.

2013 Washington D.C., USA

Prof. Rejean Plamondon
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for theoretical contributions to the understanding of human movement and its applications to signature verification, handwriting recognition, instruction, and health assessment, and for promoting on-line document processing in numerous multidisciplinary fields.

2011 Beijing, China

Prof. Sargur Srihari
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and services to the community.

2009 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Prof. Horst Bunke
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and services to the community.

2007 Parana, Curitiba, Brazil

Dr. Hiromichi Fujisawa
IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for outstanding contributions to industrial document analysis and to the ICDAR community.

2005 Seoul, South Korea

Prof. Ching Y. Suen
ICDAR Outstanding Achievement Award for more than thirty years of outstanding leadership, research and service in the pattern recognition, handwriting recognition and document analysis areas

2003 Edinburgh, Scotland

Prof. Henry Baird
ICDAR Award for Outstanding Contributions

2001 Seattle, USA

Prof. George Nagy
ICDAR Award for Lifetime Contributions

1999 Bangalore, India

Prof. Juergen Schuermann
ICDAR Lifetime Award

1997 Ulm, Germany

Dr. Jonathan Hull
ICDAR Investigator Award