CALL FOR PAPERS Pattern Analysis and Applications Special Issue on Document Image Analysis and Recognition Spring 2000 Guest Editor, Adnan Amin, University of New South Wales School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sydney, Australia INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE Optical character recognition and document image analysis have become very important areas of research. Advanced computer and communication technologies now offer better ways to store, retrieve, and distribute this information. Document Image Analysis and Recognition (DIAR) research provides the technology for automated systems for extracting and organizing information from paper based documents. Generally, these applications apply image processing and pattern recognition techniques. A document image may contain text, graphics, pictures, or a combination of these. Some commercial products are already available such as `OCR' systems for reading pages of machine-printed text, but research is still required to improve their performance on the full range of real-world variability in typography, image quality, and context. Performance evaluation of DIAR systems requires experimental design, a large train and test database, and sophisticated analysis of the results. The aim of this special issue is to showcase the state-of-the-art achievements in DIAR. Submitted papers should report the solution of a significant open problem: theoretical, algorithmic, and systems-architectural studies are welcome, as are papers describing practical applications supported by performance evaluation on a large scale. Topics appropriate for this special issue include, but are not limited to: o Document analysis algorithms and tools o Physical and logical page/image segmentation o Character and symbol recognition methods o Pre- and Post-processing algorithms o Graphical object recognition (e.g. maps and engineering drawings) o System performance measures o Recognition/Classification methodologies for DIAR systems o Innovative and industrial applications Send four copies of your manuscript (marked "DIAR Special Issue") by April 1, 1999 to the following address. Sameer Singh, Editor-in-Chief, Pattern Analysis and Applications Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, EXETER EX4 4PT, UK For paper submission instructions to authors please see: http://www.soc.plym.ac.uk/soc/sameer/paa.htm