Address block location using character recognition and address syntax

Abstract

The authors shown many advantages of using postal syntactic features in address block location. Performing character recognition at low resolution (100 PPI) is desirable for a real-time system. An efficient word matching algorithm is designed to match words against a dictionary of about 500 keywords and assign a syntactic tag to each word in a text block. The critical information and the street syntax are extracted by parsing the syntactic tags. The usage of the postal syntactic features has been introduced in many aspects such as recovering lost information, selecting a more likely destination address block, and improving destination address block segmentation. With character recognition available in the system, the utilization of other syntax and context information on the mail pieces becomes feasible. The initial testing results of the incorporation of the syntactic processing in address block location were positive and encouraging. >