Professor Manmatha is broadly interested in the areas of information retrieval, computer vision and document image processing. His recent work focuses on statistical approaches from information retrieval and machine learning for automatically annotating and retrieving images and videos. He also works on the recognizing and retrieving handwritten manuscripts. He and his students have built the first demonstration system for automatically retrieving handwritten historical manuscripts (George Washington's manuscripts). He has also worked on meta-search in information retrieval, detecting text in images and image matching.
Prof. Manmatha was area co-chair for Audio, Video and Image Retrieval for the ACM SIGIR conference in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005. He has served on program committees for a number of conferences including CIKM, CIVR, CVPR, DAS, DIAL, ICDAR, ICIP, WACV. He is an associate editor for Pattern Recognition Letters and was previously associate editor for ACM TOIS. He has also conducted tutorials on image retrieval and co-chaired and organized workshops in image retrieval and document recognition. Prof. Manmatha is a member of ACM and IEEE.