The widespread use of bankchecks in daily life makes the development of check-reading systems of fundamental relevance to banks and other financial institutions. This will improve productivity and allow advanced customer services. Therefore, many industrial companies and academic research laboratories have recently been attracted to this field, which involves several aspects, like image acquisition and preprocessing, layout analysis, preprinted data identification and recognition, user-entered data extraction, recognition of handwritten characters and words, and signature verification.The contributions collected in this book present the state of the art in the field of complete systems for bankcheck recognition, and explore the most promising trends in key aspects of this research field.

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 widespread use of bankchecks in daily life makes the development of check-reading systems of fundamental relevance to banks and other financial institutions. This will improve productivity and allow advanced customer services. Therefore, many industrial companies and academic research laboratories have recently been attracted to this field, which involves several aspects, like image acquisition and preprocessing, layout analysis, preprinted data identification and recognition, user-entered data extraction, recognition of handwritten characters and words, and signature verification.The contributions collected in this book present the state of the art in the field of complete systems for bankcheck recognition, and explore the most promising trends in key aspects of this research field.

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.