Optical character recognition and document image analysis have become very important areas with a fast growing number of researchers in the field. This comprehensive handbook with contributions by eminent experts, presents both the theoretical and practical aspects at an introductory level wherever possible.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Brazilian Symposium on Document Image Analysis, BSDIA'97, held in Curitiba in November 1997. The volume presents 19 revised full papers selected from 30 submissions as well as eight full-paper invited contributions by internationally leading authorities. The invited papers give a unique survey of the state of the art in the area. The selected papers are organized in sections on low level processing, document processing and retrieval, handwriting recognition, signature verification, and application systems.

This book brings all the major and frontier topics in the field of document analysis together into a single volume, creating a unique reference source that will be invaluable to a large audience of researchers, lecturers and students working in this field. With chapters written by some of the most distinguished researchers active in this field, this book addresses recent advances in digital document processing research and development.

Interest in the automatic processing and analysis of document images has been rapidly increasing during the past few years. This book addresses the different subfields of document image analysis, including preprocessing and segmentation, form processing, handwriting recognition, line drawing and map processing, and contextual processing.

From the participation of researchers in most important international conferences in the field, it is noted that activities in automatic document processing have been continuously growing. This book is an edited volume in Digital Document Processing where the chapters are written by several internationally renowned researchers in the domain. It will be useful for both students and researchers working on various aspects of document image analysis and recognition problems. It contains chapters on topics that are not covered by any textbook, but are more futuristic like “Going beyond the Myth of Paperlessness”, or interesting application areas like “The Role of Document Image Analysis in Trustworthy Elections” as well as “Word Recognition for Museum Index Cards with SNT-Grid”. Persons developing document analysis software for industry may also find the chapters useful and attractive. The language of the chapters is simple and clear, along with drawings/diagrams wherever necessary. An adequate number of references are given at the end of each chapter. Overall, the book is highly readable and will be an asset to the community. Renowned contributors include George Nagy, Hiromichi Fujisawa, F Kimura, D Lopresti, Chew Lim Tan, S Uchida, Thierry Paquet, Laurent Heutte, V Govindaraju, R Manmatha.

The primary goal of this book is to provide students and practitioners in the field of image analysis with cohesive information and innovative (novel) techniques compiled from independent peer-reviewed studies across the globe. Image analysis is a multi-disciplinary subject that covers expansive subjects on photography, optics, physics, mathematics, software engineering, electronics, computer science, and information technology. The integration of these multi-disciplinary studies became the foundations of specialised and emerging fields, such as medical imaging, machine vision, image processing, and computer graphics. The term image analysis deals with the process of extracting features from digital images and analysing these extracted features into measurable parameters. Therefore, image analysis is composed of three integrated parts: a device that transform electromagnetic energy into an image (i.e. photography); a method of extracting features from an image (image processing); and an analytical method that measures extracted parameters (mathematics). Although a number of books and publications are available in the study of image analysis, no true integration is available that provides a singular reference to tie in the foundation of each subject into a unified format. The overarching aim of this book is to fill these gaps and describe each contributing discipline into the science of image analysis. Consequently, this book is presented into three unified sections.