Address block location on handwritten Korean envelopes by the merging and splitting method

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based system for locating Destination Address Block (DAB) on handwritten Korean envelopes by the merging and splitting method. In the proposed system, the preprocessing steps such as adaptive binarization, connected component extraction, and deskewing are carried out first. Then, DAB containing address part, name part and zipcode part, of the input envelope image is extracted by an iterative procedure based on the knowledge acquired from the statistical feature analysis of the various handwritten Korean envelopes. Most of the systems for locating address blocks on the envelopes extracted DAB by segmenting an envelope image into several candidate blocks followed by selecting one among the candidate blocks. Because it is very difficult to segment a handwritten Korean envelope image into several blocks, due to the specific writing habits that the addresses on the envelope are written in close proximity to each other, the proposed iterative procedure determines DAB by merging and splitting the connected components, and verifies the determined DAB without segmentation and selection. Experiments with a great number of live handwritten Korean envelopes provided from Seoul Mail Center in Korea were carried out. Experimental results reveal that the proposed system is very effective for address block location on handwritten Korean envelopes.