HANDWRITING RECOGNITION OR READING?: SITUATION AT THE DAWN OF THE 3rd MILLENNIUM

During the last forty years, Human Handwriting Processing (HHP) has most often been investigated under the frameworks of Character (OCR) and Pattern Recognition. An evolution recently occurred and to date, HHP can be much more viewed as an automatic Handwriting Reading (HR) task for the machine. At the dawn of the 3rd millennium, we guess that HHP will be more considered as a perceptual and interpretation task closely connected with research into Human Language. This paper gives some guidelines and examples to design systems able to perceive and to interpret, i.e. to read the handwriting automatically.