This volume contains 20 papers from the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposium held in January 1998. There are five sessions, including: OCR systems and techniques; handwriting recognition; models and evaluations; and information retrieval.

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.

Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8–10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of “traditional” topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAS community. From the scienti?c point of view, several research ?elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e?ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries.