This is the first comprehensive text on Optical Character Recognition for Indic scripts. It covers many topics and describes OCR systems for eight different scripts—Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Urdu.

In recent years, libraries and archives all around the world have increased their efforts to digitize historical manuscripts. To integrate the manuscripts into digital libraries, pattern recognition and machine learning methods are needed to extract and index the contents of the scanned images.The unique compendium describes the outcome of the HisDoc research project, a pioneering attempt to study the whole processing chain of layout analysis, handwriting recognition, and retrieval of historical manuscripts. This description is complemented with an overview of other related research projects, in order to convey the current state of the art in the field and outline future trends.This must-have volume is a relevant reference work for librarians, archivists and computer scientists.

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.