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.