From high-speed recognition of handwritten amounts on Italian checks to an automated license plate recognition program for traffic monitoring and law enforcement in the Netherlands, 11 chapters by mainly European and Japanese contributors (with a lone Canadian representing the Northern Hemisphere) explore advances in character recognition applications integrating expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computing. The editors introduce principles of signature verification for on- and off-line systems. To overcome problems with neocognitrons a neural network model in recognizing largely rotated patterns, a rotation- invariant neocognitron is described in one paper. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
