7. The method of claim 6 wherein said detection of lines of handwritten text takes into account the changes in appearance of the word under 2D affine transforms, changes in the orientation of the lines of text, overall document skew, changes in word appearance due to occlusions, noise, or intra-word handwriting variations made by a single author.
6. A method of recognizing handwritten words in scanned documents, comprising the steps of: processing a document containing handwritten words wherein features for word localization are extracted in terms of orientation, skew and intra-word separation from handwritten words contained in said document through basis points taken from a single curve of text lines, and wherein affine coordinates are computed for all features on all curves in a curve group; storing said features in a memory; accessing said features from memory for comparison to handwritten words in a scanned document to recognize words within said scanned document; and grouping text segments of handwritten words for purposes of indexing said documents.