Handwriting recognition: State of the art and future trends -- Crucial combinations for the recognition of handwritten letters -- Recognition of printed and handwritten Arabic characters -- Objective evaluation of the discriminant power of features in an HMM-based word recognition system -- Effect of variability on letters generation with the vectorial delta-lognormal model -- Off-line signature verification: Recent advances and perspectives -- Research advances in graphics recognition: An update -- Future trends in retrospective document conversion -- Using binary pyramids to create multiresolution shape descriptors -- Contour pixel classification for character skeletonization -- Constraint propagation vs syntactical analysis for the logical structure recognition of library references -- Grammatical formalism for document understanding system: From document towards HTML text -- Document modeling for form class identification -- Composite document analysis by means of typographic characteristics -- Techniques for the automated testing of document analysis algorithms -- Graphical tools and techniques for querying document image databases -- Handwritten numeral recognition via fuzzy logic and local discriminating features -- Unsupervised learning of character prototypes -- Off-line cursive word recognition with a hybrid neural-HMM system -- A fuzzy perception for off-line handwritten signature verification -- An evaluation of different handwriting observation techniques from a signature verification point of view -- Generation of signatures by deformations -- An application of the sequential dynamic programming matching method to off-line signature verification -- A system for automatic form reading -- Automatic extraction of filled-in information from bankchecks based on prior knowledge about layout structure -- A simple methodology to bank cheque segmentation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Brazilian Symposium on Document Image Analysis, BSDIA'97, held in Curitiba in November 1997. The volume presents 19 revised full papers selected from 30 submissions as well as eight full-paper invited contributions by internationally leading authorities. The invited papers give a unique survey of the state of the art in the area. The selected papers are organized in sections on low level processing, document processing and retrieval, handwriting recognition, signature verification, and application systems.