Frontiers In Handwriting Recognition

Character and handwriting recognition by computers is attracting much attention particularly because of its potential for application in many areas such as office automation, bank check processing, recognition of postal addresses and ZIP Codes, signature verification, and document and text recognition. Over the past four decades, many methods have been proposed, developed and tested for computers to recognize characters, and they have been reported in a variety of publications. The present volume is a coherent and integrated publication containing papers which give new research results in this increasingly active field. It is a boon to researchers, scientists and engineers who need to keep abreast of new developments in character and handwriting methodologies and applications. Contents: Foreword (C Y Suen)OCR and Off-Line Character Recognition:Optical Character Recognition — A Survey (S Impedovo et al.)Transformation-Ring-Projection (TRP) Algorithm and its VLSI Implementation (Y Y Tang et al.)Regularities and Singularities in Line Pictures (J C Simon & O Baret)On-Line Character Recognition:Speed, Accuracy, and Flexibility Trade-Offs in On-Line Character Recognition (C C Tappert)Chinese and Japanese Character Recognition: Some Research Achievements on Chinese Character Recognition in China (J-W Tai)Applications:Understanding Handwritten Text in a Structured Environment: Determining ZIP Codes from Addresses (E Cohen et al.)A Structural Approach to On-Line Character Recognition: System Design and Applications (F Nouboud & R Plamondon)Progress in Verification of Skillfully Simulated Handwritten Signatures (M Ammar)and other papers Readership: Computer scientists, engineers, researchers and industrialists.

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.

Handwriting Recognition has become a very important research area which is attracting more and more scientists. In fact, the extraordinary advances in the field of data acquisition technology and the promising results of the research, nowadays make possible the development of commercial systems for processing and recognition of handwritten documents.This book contains the results of the activity of the most important academic and industrial research groups working in this area. The new issues arising in the field are focused and involve both theoretical and practical aspects related to handwriting recognition and document processing systems. The contributions of eminent experts point out the more interesting challenges for the scientific community ranging from acquisition and preprocessing of handwritten documents, to recognition of handwritten digits and words, to the design of multi-expert systems and the exploitation of the contextual knowledge to improve system performance.

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."

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.