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Handwriting has remained one of the most frequently occurring patterns that we come across in everyday life. Handwriting offers a number of interesting pattern classification problems including handwriting recognition, writer identification, signature verification, writer demographics classification and script recognition, etc. Research in these and similar related problems requires the availability of handwritten samples for validation of the developed techniques and algorithms. Like any other scientific domain, the handwriting recognition community has developed a large number of standard databases allowing development, evaluation and comparison of different techniques developed for a variety of recognition tasks. This paper is intended to provide a comprehensive survey of the handwriting databases developed during the last two decades. In addition to the statistics of the discussed databases, we also present a comparison of these databases on a number of dimensions. The ground truth information of the databases along with the supported tasks is also discussed. It is expected that this paper would not only allow researchers in handwriting recognition to objectively compare different databases but will also provide them the opportunity to select the most appropriate database(s) for evaluation of their developed systems.

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