Facsimile processing for a messaging server

We present here the fax processing task of a messaging system called Majordomo which serves as a telephone attendant. Key information is searched in fax front covers such as names, addresses, fax/phone numbers in order to sort messages and extract condensed information. First a document stage searches for physical entities at the word level. Then physical entities are discriminated into two classes: handwritten or printed. Then user specified fields, identified by keywords, are searched in the electronic version (Ocr´d transcription). Then fields are associated with their corresponding content if printed, with the corresponding image blocks if handwritten. The process was tested on a database of 55 fax images