This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports.

The papers are organized into the following topical sections: scene text detection and recognition, document classification, gold-standard benchmarks and data sets, historical document analysis, and handwriting recognition. In addition, the volume contains results of 13 scientific competitions held during ICDAR 2021.