A system towards Indian postal automation

In this paper, we present a system towards Indian postal automation. In the proposed system, at first, using run length smoothing algorithm (RLSA), we decompose the image into blocks. Based on the black pixel density and number of components inside a block, non-text block (postal stamp, postal seal etc.) are detected. Using positional information, the destination address block (DAB) is identified from text block. Next, pin-code box from the DAB is detected and numerals from the pin-code box are extracted. Since India is a multi-lingual and multi-script country, the address part may be written by combination of two languages: Arabic and a local language. For the sorting of postal documents written in Arabic and a local language Bangla, a two-stage MLP based classifier is employed to recognise Bangla and Arabic numerals. At present, the accuracy of the handwritten numeral recognition module is 92.10%.