22. The word spotting method as set forth in claim 1 , further comprising: prior to performing the word spotting, performing normalization pre-processing of those extracted writing segments not rejected by the fast-rejection classification, said normalization pre-processing including normalizing at least one of slant, skew, text height, and aspect ratio, the normalization pre-processing being performed by the computer.
1. A word spotting method comprising: defining a word model having first parameters and second parameters; extracting writing segments generally comprising images of handwritten character strings from a received document image; adjusting the first parameters of the word model respective to the extracted writing segments without adjusting the second parameters of the word model; and performing word spotting on the received document image using the word model with the adjusted first parameters and the unadjusted second parameters to identify whether a handwritten word of interest is present in the received document image; wherein at least the extracting, the adjusting, and the performing of word spotting are performed by a computer.