ABSTRACT

The earliest handwriting recognition approaches date back to the eighties, when the first attempts of automatically recognizing handwritten words were proposed, e.g., by Mori et al. (1984), Burr (1983), or Bozinovic and Srihari (1989). However, it is only in the mid-nineties that the domain takes off thanks to two main factors (Vinciarelli, 2002): on one hand, the diffusion of cheap image acquisition and storage technologies that made it possible to perform experiments on large databases of handwritten material. On the other hand, the extensive use of handwriting recognition tasks (in particular the automatic transcription of handwritten digits) in the machine learning community (Le Cun et al., 1990, Cortes and Vapnik, 1995).