The atmosphere at VNPT Lab, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), was filled with excitement and tension on the afternoon of Sunday, October 13, 2025, as the Final Round of the Chung Innovation Challenge #1 – OCR Competition officially took place. After weeks of development and rigorous submissions across multiple phases on CodaBench, the top five teams — Excalibur, NaN, Sejong OCR, dalg-gwa gae dul da, and ThreeTree — gathered to present their OCR model architectures and results before the judging panel. Each team delivered an impressive presentation, detailing their model design, training pipeline, and error analysis. The competition was exceptionally tight, with only small margins separating the teams in both accuracy and robustness metrics. The Final Jury, consisting of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Quan Thanh Tho, Dr. Vo Tuan Binh, and Mr. Sudong Chung, reviewed each team’s submissions and phase results carefully to ensure fairness and objectivity. After nearly 30 minutes of intense discussion, the final ranking was decided:
🏆 1st Prize: Excalibur
🥈 2nd Prize: dalg-gwa gae dul da
🥉 3rd Prize: NaN
🎖️ Consolation Prizes: Sejong OCR and ThreeTree
The judges praised all teams for their outstanding effort, especially in areas such as model interpretability, multilingual OCR handling, and computational optimization. Mr. Sudong Chung, the challenge’s sponsor and judge, expressed his admiration for the creativity and technical maturity shown by the student participants, highlighting how these competitions foster real-world research capabilities. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Quan Thanh Tho also emphasized that the challenge reflected not only technical skill but also teamwork, adaptability, and perseverance — essential qualities for young researchers in AI. The Chung Innovation Challenge #1, organized by the URA Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, HCMUT, in collaboration with Mr. Sudong Chung, aims to encourage innovation in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and applied AI. The competition featured multiple phases hosted on Google Colab and CodaBench, allowing teams to explore real-world OCR challenges in a collaborative environment. Congratulations to all participating teams for making this first season of the Chung Innovation Challenge a success — setting a high benchmark for future editions.