Locating the Destination Address Block on Images of Complex Mail Pieces

For automatic processing of mail, the problem of locating the destination address block (DAB) on the images of mail pieces is still a bottleneck. Using a bottom-up approach, we locate the DAB in allusion to complex mail pieces. Our algorithm starts from local binarization between the rising and falling points in the image, following by searching, filtering, feature extraction, and modified region growing of connected components. Finally, some features of the candidate blocks are extracted for assigning weights to locate the DAB. The success of our algorithm for locating the DAB on complex mail pieces is demonstrated on 100 test images with the success rate 90.7%. The results also show that our approach can process a DAB which is skewed, hand-written, or machine-printed. The average processing time for each piece image of size 720×960 is 2.66 seconds on a PC (PentiumII-400). *Correspondence addressee