Historical Review of Theory and Practice of Handwritten Character Recognition

Abstract

The problems of optical character recognition are arranged according to their difficulties. This arrangement gives a bird's eye view of the research activities in past, present, and future. The tremendous work to solve these problems is looked at from the angle of ``space versus description.'' The word ``space'' means a functional analysis approach rather than a statistical one and the word ``description'' means a structural analysis approach, in each of which some representative work is mentioned historically. Finally, these two approaches are discussed comparatively.