1 Introduction  
1.1 OCR is a successful branch of Pattern Recognition  
1.2 Two categories of OCR systems  
1.3 Major trends in modern OCR  
1.4 Main focus and motivation of this report  
2 Optical character recognition  
2.1 Essential OCR techniques  
2.2 Currently available OCR systems  
2.3 Why optical character recognition is difficult  
2.4 Document image types  
2.5 Script and language issues  
2.6 Effects of language mixing  
2.7 Character types  
2.8 Handwriting recognition  
2.9 Flexibility  
2.10 Accuracy  
2.11 Productivity  
3 OCR pre-processing  
3.1 Document image defects  
3.2 Document image enhancement  
3.3 Document segmentation  
4 OCR post-processing  
5 Summary  
5.1 Conclusions  
5.2 Promising directions  
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