ICDAR 2025 Competition on Historical Map Text Detection, Recognition, and Linking

Historical maps are valuable for history, social sciences, and linguistics but pose challenges for automatic transcription. This competition edition continues to address detection, recognition, and linking of text in historical maps, with new features: expanded French Land Registers data, a new Taiwanese dataset with Chinese characters, synthetic training data, and improved linking evaluation metrics. Seven teams participated with over 25 submissions across four tasks and three datasets. While detection performance is strong, recognition and linking remain difficult, though improvements were seen with Bézier curve line fitting and enhanced linking pipelines. All resources are publicly available on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/communities/icdar-maptext).