Postal address block location in real time

Author

Palumbo, Paul W. ; Srihari, Sargur N. ; Soh, Tung ; Sridhar, Ramalingam ; Demjanenko, Victor

Author_Institution

State Univ. of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

Volume

25

Issue

7

fYear

1992

fDate

7/1/1992 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

34

Lastpage

42

Abstract

The CEDAR real-time address block location system, which determines candidates for the location of the destination address from a scanned mail piece image, is described. For each candidate destination address block (DAB), the address block location (ABL) system determines the line segmentation, global orientation, block skew, an indication of whether the address appears to be handwritten or machine printed, and a value indicating the degree of confidence that the block actually contains the destination address. With 20-MHz Sparc processors, the average time per mail piece for the combined hardware and software system components is 0.210 seconds. The system located 89.0% of the addresses as the top choice. Recent developments in the system include the use of a top-down segmentation tool, address syntax analysis using only connected component data, and improvements to the segmentation refinement routines. This has increased top choice performance to 91.4%.<>

Keywords

computer vision; computerised pattern recognition; computerised picture processing; real-time systems; CEDAR real-time address block location system; address syntax analysis; block skew; destination address block; global orientation; line segmentation; segmentation refinement routines; top-down segmentation tool; Automation; Character recognition; Image processing; Image segmentation; Optical character recognition software; Postal services; Real time systems; Sorting; Text analysis; Throughput;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computer

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9162

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/2.144438

Filename

144438