This book provides a comprehensive presentation of a recently introduced framework, named "probabilistic indexing" (PrIx), for searching text in large collections of document images and other related applications. It fosters the development of new search engines for effective information retrieval from manuscripts which, however, lack the electronic text (transcripts) that would typically be required for such search and retrieval tasks.

The book is structured into 11 chapters and three appendices. The first two chapters briefly outline the necessary fundamentals and state of the art in pattern recognition, statistical decision theory, and handwritten text recognition.

Chapter 3 presents approaches for indexing (as opposed to “spotting”) each region of a handwritten text image which is likely to contain a word. Next, Chapter 4 describes models adopted for handwritten text in images, namely hidden Markov models, convolutional and recurrent neural networks and language models, and provides full details of weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) concepts and methods, needed in further chapters of the book.

Chapter 5 explains the set of techniques and algorithms developed to generate image probabilistic indexes which allow for fast search and retrieval of textual information in the indexed images. Chapter 6 then presents experimental evaluations of the proposed framework and algorithms on different traditional benchmark datasets and compares them with other approaches, while Chapter 7 reviews the most popular keyword-spotting approaches.

Chapter 8 explains how PrIx can support classical free-text search tools, while Chapter 9 presents new methods that use PrIx not only for searching, but also to deal with text analytics and other related natural language processing and information extraction tasks. Chapter 10 shows how the proposed solutions can be used to effectively index very large collections of handwritten document images, before Chapter 11 eventually summarizes the book and suggests promising lines of future research.

The appendices detail the necessary mathematical foundations for the work and presents details of the text image collections and datasets used in the experiments throughout the book. This book is written for researchers and (post-)graduate students in pattern recognition and information retrieval.

It will also be of interest to people in areas like history, criminology, or psychology who need technical support to evaluate, understand or decode historical or contemporary handwritten text. .