For many years researchers in the field of Handwriting Recognition were considered to be working in an area of minor importance in Pattern Recog nition. They had only the possibility to present the results of their research at general conferences such as the ICPR or publish their papers in journals such as some of the IEEE series or PR, together with many other papers generally oriented to the more promising areas of Pattern Recognition. The series of International Workshops on Frontiers in Handwriting Recog nition and International Conferences on Document Analysis and Recognition together with some special issues of several journals are now fulfilling the expectations of many researchers who have been attracted to this area and are involving many academic institutions and industrial companies. But in order to facilitate the introduction of young researchers into the field and give them both theoretically and practically powerful tools, it is now time that some high level teaching schools in handwriting recognition be held, also in order to unite the foundations of the field. Therefore it was my pleasure to organize the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Fundamentals in Handwriting Recognition that had its origin in many exchanges among the most important specialists in the field, during the International Workshops on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.

Advances in Handwriting Recognition contains selected key papers from the 6th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (IWFHR '98), held in Taejon, Korea from 12 to 14, August 1998. Most of the papers have been expanded or extensively revised to include helpful discussions, suggestions or comments made during the workshop.

Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition contains selected key papers from the 6th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (IWFHR '98), held in Taejon, Korea from 12 to 14, August 1998. Most of the papers have been expanded or extensively revised to include helpful discussions, suggestions or comments made during the workshop.

The fifth volume in this book series consists of a collection of new papers written by a diverse group of international scholars. Papers and presentations were carefully selected from 160 papers submitted to the International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence held in Montreal, Quebec (May 2018) and an associated free public lecture entitled 'Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition: Trendy Technologies in Our Modern Digital World'. Chapters address topics such as the evolution of AI, natural language processing, off and on-line handwriting analysis, tracking and detection systems, neural networks, rating video games, computer-aided diagnosis, and digital learning.Within an increasingly digital world, 'artificial intelligence' is becoming a household term and a topic of great interest to many people worldwide. Pattern recognition, in using key features to classify data, has a strong relationship with artificial intelligence. This book not only complements other monographs in the series, it also provides the latest information. It is geared to promote interest and understanding about pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to the general public. It may also be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the field. Rather than focusing on one specific area, the book introduces readers to various basic concepts and to various potential areas where pattern recognition and artificial intelligence can be applied to make valuable contributions to other fields such as medicine, teaching and learning, forensic science, surveillance, online reviews, computer vision and object tracking.

The papers in this volume deal specifically with the problem of handwriting recognition and the new frontiers of research in the scientific community - including the significance of linguistic and contextual information in handwriting recognition and for adaptive preprocessing and postprocessing. Also addressed are problems related to human and computer behaviour in recognition. The aim of this book is not only to point out the state-of-the-art and the frontiers in the field of handwriting recognition, but also to stimulate research and ideas in the fields of design and implementation of on-line and off-line systems that recognize isolated and connected handwritten characters, words and signatures."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, DPPR 2011, held in Tirunelveli, India, in September 2011. The 48 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from about 400 submissions. The conference brought together leading researchers, engineers and scientists in the domain of Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. The papers cover all theoretical and practical aspects of the field and present new advances and current research results in two tracks, namely: digital image processing and pattern recognition, and computer science, engineering and information technology.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the most prominent and successful example of pattern recognition to date. There are thousands of research papers and dozens of OCR products. Optical Character Rcognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier offers a perspective on the performance of current OCR systems by illustrating and explaining actual OCR errors. The pictures and analysis provide insight into the strengths and weaknesses of current OCR systems, and a road map to future progress. Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier will pique the interest of users and developers of OCR products and desktop scanners, as well as teachers and students of pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval. The first chapter compares the character recognition abilities of humans and computers. The next four chapters present 280 illustrated examples of recognition errors, in a taxonomy consisting of Imaging Defects, Similar Symbols, Punctuation, and Typography. These examples were drawn from large-scale tests conducted by the authors. The final chapter discusses possible approaches for improving the accuracy of today's systems, and is followed by an annotated bibliography. Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

"Much of pattern recognition theory and practice, including methods such as Support Vector Machines, has emerged in an attempt to solve the character recognition problem. This book is written by very well-known academics who have worked in the field for many years and have made significant and lasting contributions. The book will no doubt be of value to students and practitioners." -Sargur N. Srihari, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Director, Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), University at Buffalo, The State University of New York "The disciplines of optical character recognition and document image analysis have a history of more than forty years. In the last decade, the importance and popularity of these areas have grown enormously. Surprisingly, however, the field is not well covered by any textbook. This book has been written by prominent leaders in the field. It includes all important topics in optical character recognition and document analysis, and is written in a very coherent and comprehensive style. This book satisfies an urgent need. It is a volume the community has been awaiting for a long time, and I can enthusiastically recommend it to everybody working in the area." -Horst Bunke, Professor, Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (IAM), University of Bern, Switzerland In Character Recognition Systems, the authors provide practitioners and students with the fundamental principles and state-of-the-art computational methods of reading printed texts and handwritten materials. The information presented is analogous to the stages of a computer recognition system, helping readers master the theory and latest methodologies used in character recognition in a meaningful way. This book covers: * Perspectives on the history, applications, and evolution of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) * The most widely used pre-processing techniques, as well as methods for extracting character contours and skeletons * Evaluating extracted features, both structural and statistical * Modern classification methods that are successful in character recognition, including statistical methods, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), structural methods, and multi-classifier methods * An overview of word and string recognition methods and techniques * Case studies that illustrate practical applications, with descriptions of the methods and theories behind the experimental results Each chapter contains major steps and tricks to handle the tasks described at-hand. Researchers and graduate students in computer science and engineering will find this book useful for designing a concrete system in OCR technology, while practitioners will rely on it as a valuable resource for the latest advances and modern technologies that aren't covered elsewhere in a single book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR 2022, which took place in Hyderabad, India, during December 4-7, 2022. The 36 full papers and 1 short paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The contributions were organized in topical sections as follows: Historical Document Processing; Signature Verification and Writer Identification; Symbol and Graphics Recognition; Handwriting Recognition and Understanding; Handwriting Datasets and Synthetic Handwriting Generation; Document Analysis and Processing.