Towards the full hand-written address processing

摘要

Mail sorting must process two kinds of objects, handwritten and machine printed addresses, each having different levels of difficulty in terms of distribution and recognition. Indeed, handwritten mail represents a small part of the whole mail stream, and is characterised by a wide range of writing styles. For these two reasons the processing of machine printed mail has usually been favoured. However this is changing due to technical and commercial reasons and the processing of handwritten mail is evolving towards the recognition of all the fields within the address.rnThis paper presents the Mannesmann Dematic Postal Automation hand-written reader: this application is a state of the art industrial OCR enabling the recognition of the address delivery field. A description of the word recognition technique is provided, including the techniques used to match lexicons of some thousand elements.