Preface

     On behalf of the organizing committee, we are very pleased to present the technical program and the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2003).

     Thanks to the members of the Program Committee and the other reviewers for their timely reviews. The PC members and the reviewers provided very thorough reviews making the task of the PC Chairs a lot simpler.

     The Confman software was used to manage the paper submission and review process. Apostolos Antonacopoulos, the Publications Chair, set up and managed Confman. Mike Fairhurst and Andy Downton, the General Chairs, and the Publications Chair helped build the program for the conference. Our most sincere thanks are due to them.

     We received a total of 288 submissions, of which 227 were accepted. Of the accepted papers, we scheduled 134 for oral presentation and 93 for poster sessions. The PC Chairs received help from a total of 147 reviewers including 46 members of the Program Committee.

     The contact authors of the submissions were from 25 different countries across the six continents. Following is the number of submissions from each continent:

     Asia - 115, Europe - 83, North America - 73, South America - 8, Australia - 5, and Africa - 4.

     The final program is made up of 33 oral sessions, 3 poster sessions, and 7 keynote addresses spread over 3 days. The oral sessions are organized in 3 parallel tracks. In addition to the traditional areas of text processing and graphics recognition, this year’s conference includes sessions on emerging areas such as web documents and graphical on-line recognition.

We look forward to seeing you in Edinburgh.

Atul K. Chhabra

Lambert Schomaker

Jin H. Kim

Program Committee Co-chairs

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