Genesis of Postal Address Reading, Current State and Future Prospects

摘要

We provide an overview of the world largest industrial OCR application: Postal Address Reading. We will talk about its humble beginnings and will elaborate how it evolved rapidly to high-tech machinery and discuss its future prospects. Some prominent historical-, system-, methodological-, cultural- and social aspects will also be illuminated.Every day, millions of mail pieces are automatically sorted and distributed based on a powerful fleet of readers, which recognize millions of characters and words per second and recombine them to meaningful and valid addresses. Cheques and paper forms will vanish sooner or later, since they can be completely replaced by electronic cash flow and e-forms. Mail, however, will persist and even grow in volume for three good reasons: First, mail is conjoined with goods and material, especially in the era of web-shopping. Second, Postal Services are the only world comprising service reaching even the most remote places in the world. Third, postal services will undergo a hybridization process, which means that mail and email will fuse to hybrid mail. Hybrid mail will reach the recipient in the appropriate form according to the recipients preferences, no matter, if it was sent as letter, fax or email.