Robust approach of address block localization in business mail by graph coloring

An efficient mail sorting system is mainly based on an accurate optical recognition of the addresses on the envelopes. However, the localizing of the address block should be done before the OCR recognition process. The location step is very crucial as it has a great impact on the global performance of the system. Actually, a good localizing step leads to a better recognition rate. The limit of current methods depends on modular linear architectures used for address block localization. Their performances depend on each independent module performance. We are presenting in this paper a new approach for ABL based on the hierarchical graph coloring and on the pyramidal data organization. This new approach presents the advantage to guarantee a good coherence between different modules and that reduces both the computation time and the rejection rate. The proposed method gives a very satisfying rate of 98% of good locations on a set of 750 envelope images.