Vision allows humans to perceive and empathize the world surrounding them, while computer vision aims to duplicate the effect of human vision by electronically perceiving and understanding an image. The image data can take many forms, such as a video sequence, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data from a medical scanner. As a technological branch of knowledge, computer vision seeks to apply the theories and models of computer vision to the construction of computer vision systems.

One of the most spectacular application fields is medical computer vision or medical image processing. This area is characterized by the extraction of information from image data for the purpose of making a medical diagnosis of a patient. Generally, image data is in the form of microscopy images, X-ray images, angiography images, ultrasonic images, and tomography images. A second application area in computer vision is in industry. Military applications are probably one of the largest areas for computer vision. The obvious examples are detection of enemy soldiers or vehicles and missile guidance. One of the newer application areas is autonomous vehicles, which include submersibles, land-based vehicles (small robots with wheels, cars or trucks), aerial vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Documents are information organized and presented for human understanding. Documents are where information meets with people and their work. By bringing technology to the process of producing and using documents one has the opportunity to achieve significant productivity enhancements. The volume of paper-based documents continues to grow at a rapid rate in spite of the use of electronic documents. The often-repeated slogan of the early 1980’s paperless office for all organizations has now given a way to different objectives; namely, those dealing with the flow of electronic documents in an efficient and an integrated way. The ultimate solution is to use computers to deal with paper documents as one deals with different forms of computer storage media. That is, paper should be as readable by the computer as the magnetic or the optical disks are at present. If this is achieved then the major advantage is that unlike current computer storage media, both the computer and the people will read paper documents. Since the field of document processing is relatively new and dynamic, the current methods have scope for continual improvement and innovation. The intended users of the outcome of this research are the executives, the managers and other decision makers, whose business endeavors require some acquaintance or knowledge of the field of document image processing.