Dr. Baird received a Special Appreciation Award for “initiating and constructively supporting the IAPR Document Analysis Systems (DAS) workshop series," September 2004.

The ICDAR Award for Outstanding Contributions for "playing a central role in the 1990s' renaissance of basic research in document image analysis and for countless technical and methodological contributions to OCR research," August 2003.

A PARC Outstanding Performance Award for Delivering Results of "triage" research into production in a Xerox document scanning service bureau, 2002.

Elected Fellow of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) "for leadership in document image analysis research," effective January 1, 1999.

Elected Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) "for contributions to document analysis and for service to the IAPR," 1996.

His Princeton University Ph.D. thesis won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation award in 1984, and was published in book form by the MIT Press.

His presentation of a new method for VLSI mask artwork analysis at the IEEE/ACM 14th Design Automation Conference in 1977 was voted the Outstanding Paper of the conference.

He received two RCA Laboratories Outstanding Achievement awards, one in 1976 for work on design verification aids for VLSI circuits, and the other in 1979 for real-time factory data analysis.

National Merit Scholarship, 1962.