State of the art in off-line handwriting applications

When focusing on off-line handwriting, two styles have to be distinguished: isolated hand-printed characters and cursive script. This paper briefly describes applications handwriting involved in focusing on requirements, main characteristics and essential problems. After discussing the processing steps, the paper concludes by summarizing the essential open problems to be solved for significantly improving existing systems and opening new applications. The most important commercial applications are: image acquisition and preprocessing; segmentation; script recognition; and engineering questions