Location of name and address on fax cover pages

A document analysis system which understands the incoming fax cover pages can serve as a mail routing system. This paper reports our research as part of an effort to realize such a system and focuses on locating the recipient´s name and address on fax cover sheets. The name and address regions will later be extracted from the image and sent to an address interpretation unit for further processing. Fax cover pages are one type of documents which have changeable layout, contain many objects of different nature, and possess compact contents. Previous page segmentation techniques which mainly used geometric features are found not suitable for the current task. Our method uses a scheme which strongly couples text recognition and block segmentation. The system attempts to locate and recognize words which are data field indicators so as to figure out the positions of such keywords as “TO” and “COMPANY”. The information regarding the positions of “TO” and “COMPANY” indicators is used as reference in block segmentation to segment out their associated data regions. Our system has proved to work reasonably well on a sample set composed of 12 machined-printed images and 115 handwritten images