an ideal professional reference source and an excellent entry point for course work in the subject. Key features of Optical Character Recognition: Theoretical framework based on functional analysis-- not previously available in a detailed, English-language version Extensive explanation of preprocessing theory, including blurring and sampling, normalization, thinning, and binary and gray-scale morphology Intensive section on feature extraction, exploring linear methods, structure analysis, and algebraic description Original work on systematic shape description as a prerequisite to matching Original material on elastic matching, including image recognition of characters and objects Requires only the standard undergraduate requisites of algebra, linear algebra, and advanced calculus