Sebastiano Impedovo - Böcker

For many years researchers in the field of Handwriting Recognition were considered to be working in an area of minor importance in Pattern Recog­ nition. They had only the possibility to present the results of their research at general conferences such as the ICPR or publish their papers in journals such as some of the IEEE series or PR, together with many other papers generally oriented to the more promising areas of Pattern Recognition. The series of International Workshops on Frontiers in Handwriting Recog­ nition and International Conferences on Document Analysis and Recognition together with some special issues of several journals are now fulfilling the expectations of many researchers who have been attracted to this area and are involving many academic institutions and industrial companies. But in order to facilitate the introduction of young researchers into the field and give them both theoretically and practically powerful tools, it is now time that some high level teaching schools in handwriting recognition be held, also in order to unite the foundations of the field. Therefore it was my pleasure to organize the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Fundamentals in Handwriting Recognition that had its origin in many exchanges among the most important specialists in the field, during the International Workshops on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 7ICIAP held in Monopoli, Italy.Some of the Areas Covered Include: Active Vision, Computer Vision System; Data Structures and Representations; Feature Extraction; Geometric Modelling; Human Perception and Computer Vision; Image Analysis; Language for Image Modelling; Processing and Retrieval; Motion Analysis and Time Varying Images; Neurocomputing for Recognition; Parallel Computer Architecture; Pattern Recognition; Picture and Video Coding.

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.