Editorial preface

This special issue represents a selected group of papers drawn from those presented in the program of the Tenth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR2009). ICDAR2009 was held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Catalonia, Spain in July 26–29, 2009. ICDAR is the main event of the technical committees TC-10 (Graphics Recognition) and TC-11 (reading Systems) within the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The volume and quality of technical material submitted to the conference confirm that Document Analysis and Recognition is an active community, both from the scientific and industrial sides, and reinforce ICDAR’s status as one of the flagship Pattern Recognition conferences. ICDAR2009 had a varied and high-quality technical program. More than 430 manuscripts were submitted. Of these, 87