Handwritten Street Name Recognition for Indian Postal Automation

Although for postal automation there are many pieces of work towards street name recognition on non-Indian languages, to the best of our knowledge there is no work on street name recognition on Indian languages. In this paper we proposed a scheme for recognition of Indian street name written in Bangla script. Because of the writing style of different individuals some of the characters in a street name may touch with its neighboring characters. Accurate segmentation of such touching into individual characters is a difficult task. To avoid such segmentation, here we consider a street name string as word and the street name recognition problem is treated as lexicon driven word recognition. Some of the street names may contain two or more words and we have concatenated these words to have a single word. In the proposed method, at first, street names are binarized and pre-segmented into possible primitive components (individual characters or its parts) analyzing their cavity portions. Pre-segmented components of a street name are then merged into possible characters to get the best street name. Dynamic programming (DP) is applied for the merging using total likelihood of characters as the objective function. To compute the likelihood of a character, modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) is used. Our proposed system shows 99.03% reliability with 18.80% rejection, and 0.79% error rates when tested on 4450 handwritten Bangla street name samples.