New Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition

After more than 20 years of continuous and intensive effort devoted to solving the challenges of handwriting recognition, progress in recent years has been very promising. Those challenges are now considered to constitute a millennium problem (cf. addendum p. xx). On top of the excitement generated by the ground-breaking advances already made in this field can be added the significant contributions described in this special issue, which were presented at the ICFHR 2008 Conference held in Montreal from August 18 to 21, 2008. Of the 161 submissions received for this conference from 26 countries, 118 papers were selected following the review process, 39 for oral presentation and 79 for poster presentation. The best 26 papers were then selected for extensive and thorough revision through peer review, and subsequent publication in this Special Issue on Handwriting Recognition of the Journal, Pattern Recognition. In addition, in this first edition of the ICFHR promoted as an international conference, a panel discussion was organized as a key feature to highlight advances in the field of handwriting recognition, which was chaired by M. Cheriet. Panelists M. El Yacoubi, H. Fujisawa, D. Lopresti, and G. Lorette talked about the achievements of those 20 years of handwriting recognition and about its future. Following these outstanding presentations, conference attendees had the opportunity to air their questions and concerns during open and fruitful exchanges. Biographic details on the panelists, along with highlights of the discussions, are included in an addendum at the end of this editorial. In order to provide comprehensive content for this special issue, we have classified the 26 papers into the following broad topics, an arrangement which corresponds to their mapping to conference sessions: