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

Arabic character recognition, A. Amin; automatic reading of braille documents, A. Antonacopoulos; techniques for improving OCR results, A. Dengel; offline handwritten word recognition using hidden Markov models, A. Kundu; combinations of multiple classifier decisions for OCR, L. Lam and C.Y. Suen; classification techniques - statistical pattern recognition, neural networks and their relations, J. Schurmann; cursive handwriting recognition - contextual and context - free techniques, M. Shridhar and Kimura; multilingual document recognition, L. Spitz; information retrieval and OCR, K. Taghva; technical drawing analysis - including vectorization, D. Dori and K. Tombre; reading of music notation, N. Carter and D. Bainbridge; benchmarking, T. Nartker et al; automatic signature verification, S. Impedovo. (Part Contents).