The chapter focuses on one of the key issues in document image processing i.e., graphical symbol recognition. Graphical symbol recognition is a sub-field of a larger research domain: pattern recognition. The chapter covers several approaches (i.e., statistical, structural and syntactic) and specially designed symbol recognition techniques inspired by real-world industrial problems. It, in general, contains research problems, state-of-the-art methods that convey basic steps as well as prominent concepts or techniques and research standpoints/directions that are associated with graphical symbol recognition. Keywords. Graphics processing • graphical symbol • recognition, retrieval and spotting • statistical approaches • structural and syntactic approaches • real-world problems. '... the recurring wish for methods capable of efficiently combining structural and statistical methods' and 'the very structural and spatial nature of the information we work with makes structural methods quite natural in the community.' The problem can further be extended to symbol spotting, but one can view this as a kind of retrieval (29-33), which is guided by user queries. Additionally, the recognition/retrieval process can be made with the help of local descriptors like scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and with the use of techniques like bag-of-features so that either primitive or region extraction (segmentation) can be avoided. The question always remains the same, 'what approach does what (i.e., performance) in which context?'. As mentioned earlier, graphics recognition has an extremely rich state-of-the-art literature in symbol recognition and localization (6; 9; 34; 35). But the major state-of-the-art methods for symbol recognition,