This unique guide/reference is the very first comprehensive book on the subject of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for Indic scripts. Features: contains contributions from the leading researchers in the field; discusses data set creation for OCR development; describes OCR systems that cover 8 different scripts – Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Urdu (Perso-Arabic); explores the challenges of Indic script handwriting recognition in the online domain; examines the development of handwriting-based text input systems; describes ongoing work to increase access to Indian cultural heritage materials; provides a section on the enhancement of text and images obtained from historical Indic palm leaf manuscripts; investigates different techniques for word spotting in Indic scripts; reviews mono-lingual and cross-lingual information retrieval in Indic languages. This is an excellent reference for researchers and graduate students studying OCR technology and methodologies.