Location and interpretation of destination addresses on handwritten Chinese envelopes

Virtually all mail sorting machines currently used in China only recognize post code and ignore the useful destination address information on the envelopes. This paper discusses how to eciently utilize such important information on handwritten Chinese envelopes in order to improve the sorting performance. For this purpose, two particular problems are addressed, respectively. One is the location of destination address block (DAB) on the envelope, and a new bottom-up location method is described in detail. The other is the interpretation of handwritten Chinese destination address strings. We present our e€ort on using as many geometric constraints as possible in the string segmentation. Then a novel address interpretation algorithm with global optimization is proposed. It combines the segmentation, recognition and address context information by the best-path search. The e€ectiveness of the proposed algorithms is fully demonstrated by our experiments on real envelopes.