Handwritten Document Image Processing: Identification, Matching, and Indexing of Handwriting in Noisy Document Images

Throughout history, handwriting has been the primary means of recording information that is persevered across both time and space. With the coming of the electronic document era, we are challenged with making an enormous amount of handwritten documents available for electronic access. Though many handwritten documents contain only handwriting, now, more are mixed with printed text, noise, and background patterns. Handwriting in a printed document often indicates corrections, additions, or other supplemental information that should be treated differently from the main content. The mixture of handwriting with other components presents a great challenge for making an original document electronically accessible. In this book, we propose a novel approach to separating a handwritten document into different layers, such as handwriting, machine printed text, noise, and background patterns. The identified handwriting may be further analyzed. For example, we propose a novel point-pattern based handwriting matching technique and apply it for handwriting synthesis and retrieval.