Recognition of cursive Roman handwriting: past, present and future

This paper reviews the state of the art in off-line Roman cursive handwriting recognition. The input provided to an off-line handwriting recognition system is an image of a digit, a word, or - more generally -some text, and the system produces, as output, an ASCII transcription of the input. This task involves a number of processing steps, some of which are quite difficult. Typically, preprocessing, normalization, feature extraction, classification, and postprocessing operations are required. We´ll survey the state of the art, analyze recent trends, and try to identify challenges for future research in this field.