The large number of existing documents and the production of a multitude of new ones every year raise important issues in efficient handling, retrieval and storage of these documents and the information which they contain. This has led to the emergence of new research domains dealing with the recognition by computers of the constituent elements of documents - including characters, symbols, text, lines, graphics, images, handwriting, signatures, etc. In addition, these new domains deal with automatic analyses of the overall physical and logical structures of documents, with the ultimate objective of a high-level understanding of their semantic content. We have also seen renewed interest in optical character recognition (OCR) and handwriting recognition during the last decade. Document analysis and recognition are obviously the next stage.

Automatic, intelligent processing of documents is at the intersections of many fields of research, especially of computer vision, image analysis, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, as well as studies on reading, handwriting and linguistics. Although quality document related publications continue to appear in journals dedicated to these domains, the community will benefit from having this journal as a focal point for archival literature dedicated to document analysis and recognition.

This journal publishes articles of four primary types - original research papers, correspondence, overviews and summaries, and research notes. Special issues on active areas of research are encouraged. We welcome submissions in all areas related to document analysis and recognition.

New datasets to support document analysis research are generally of interest to the readership of IJDAR. Several conditions need to be satisfied first, however, before a paper presenting such a dataset will be considered for publication in the journal. (a) The dataset must be new, (b) The dataset must be freely available to the internationa l research community on a public repository, and (c) The dataset and its distribution must follow all applicable laws and regulations regarding personal data privacy and usage rights. In addition, a new dataset in-and-of-itself does not make a publishable paper. The paper must include, in addition, experimental results that illustrate and demonstrate the utility and significance of the new dataset.

Possible topics include:

- Document Image Processing

- Document Models

- Handwriting Models and Analysis

- Character and Word Recognition

- On-line Recognition

- Pen Based Computing

- Multi-lingual Processing

- Physical and Logical Analysis

- Graphics Recognition

- Map and Line Drawing Understanding

- Storage and Retrieval of Documents

- Text Analysis and Processing

- Natural Language Issues

- Information Extraction and Filtering

- Performance Evaluation

- Document Authentification and Validation

- Implementations, Applications and Systems

as well as non-traditional topics such as:

- Processing Text in Other Contexts

- Multimedia and Hypermedia Analysis

- Time Varying Documents

- Distributed Document Collections (Digital Libraries).

Editors-in-Chief

Koichi Kise
Osaka Prefecture University
Sakai, Osaka 599-8531, Japan
Tel.: +81-72-254-9276 
Fax: +81-72-254-8291
kise@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp 

Daniel Lopresti
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA
Tel: +1-610-758-5782
Fax: +1-610-758-4096
lopresti@cse.lehigh.edu

Simone Marinai
Università di Firenze
Via di Santa Marta, 3, 
50139, Florence, Italy
Tel.: +39-055-4796-452
Email: simone.marinai@unifi.it

Founding Editor

David S. Doermann (Managing Editor)
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-2500, USA

Editorial Board

E.H. Barney Smith
Boise State University
Boise, Idaho, USA
EBarneySmith@boisestate.edu

A. Belaid
LORIA
Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France
abdel.belaid@loria.fr

M. Blumenstein
University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Michael.Blumenstein@uts.edu.au

B.B. Chaudhuri
Indian Statistical Institute
Kolkata, India
bbcisical@gmail.com

A.R. Dengel
DFKI
Kaiserslautern, Germany
Andreas.Dengel@dfki.de

G. A. Fink
Technische Universität Dortmund, 
Dortmund, Germany 
Gernot.Fink@tu-dortmund.de

H. Fujisawa
Waseda University,
Tokyo, Japan
hyf@xd6.so-net.ne.jp

U. Garain
Indian Statistical Institute
India
utpal@isical.ac.in

B. Gatos
National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos"
Greece
bgat@iit.demokritos.gr

V. Govindaraju
CEDAR, University at Buffalo
Amherst, NY 14228, USA
govind@cedar.buffalo.edu

M. Iwamura
Osaka Prefecture University
Osaka, Japan
masa@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp

B. Lamiroy
LORIA
Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France 
Bart.Lamiroy@loria.fr

C-L Liu
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China
liucl@nlpr.ia.ac.cn

M. Liwicki
Luleå University of Technology
Sweden
marcus.liwicki@ltu.se

J. Llados
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
josep@cvc.uab.es

V. Märgner
Braunschweig Technical University
Germany
volker.maergner@gmail.com

J-M. Ogier 
University of la Rochelle
France
jean-marc.ogier@univ-lr.fr

U. Pal 
Indian Statistical Institute
Kolkata, India 
umapada@isical.ac.in

R. Sabourin
Ecole de Technologie
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
robert.sabourin@etsmtl.ca

S. Setlur
University of Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, USA
setlur@buffalo.edu

F. Shafait
National University of Science and Technology
Pakistan
faisal.shafait@seecs.nust.edu.pk

E. Valveny
Computer Vision Center 
Spain
ernest@cvc.uab.es

R. Zanibbi 
Rochester Institute of Technology
NY, USA
rxzvcs@rit.edu