Interpretation and Retrieval of Handwritten Documents
Dr Sargur Srihari
SUNY
Time:
Place: 151 Com Arts
Host: A. Jain
Abstract:
Handwriting is a natural means of recording personal information, in addition to being a communication medium. Although computer recognition of handwriting seems to be a solved problem with the ubiquity of PDAs - where writing is on specialized surfaces (called dynamic handwriting)-recognition of handwriting on paper (or static handwriting) poses numerous challenges. The talk will give an overview of several topics in the processing of handwriting on paper, including postal address recognition, forensic document examination and automatic scoring of school essays. Some of our approaches to studying the individuality of handwriting, and searching handwritten document repositories will be described.
Biography:
Sargur (Hari) Srihari is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (SUNY), in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He teaches courses in data mining, pattern recognition and machine learning.
He is the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR)--whose work on handwritten address interpretation led to systems now being deployed by several postal services of the world including USPS, Australia Post and UK Royal Mail. His more recent work on developing information processing models for questioned document examination have been cited in several federal court cases in the admissibility of handwriting evidence.
Srihari is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Library of Medicine, and Technical Advisory Boards of two companies. He received a BE in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and an M.S and PhD in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University, Columbus. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award by The Ohio State University College of Engineering in 1999 and a best paper award at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition in 2003.