1. General issues

Before getting to the heart of the matter and examining recognition techniques, it is useful to describe the objectives of document image recognition in more detail. To do this, we'll establish a typology of documents and list the targeted applications.

The notion of document is very general and can, depending on the context, evoke any object used to preserve or transmit information tangible to human beings; according to this definition, a document can be textual, sound, graphic or video. In this article, we will limit our considerations to documents with a static representation, i.e. a still image that can be reproduced on paper. Let's characterize these documents in terms of content, complexity and medium.