Hand-written Postcode Recognition by Fuzzy Artmap Neural Network

This paper presents a new method of recognising hand-written postcodes using the Fuzzy ARTMAP neural network, a relatively new architecture of the neural network family. It has the capability to process in parallel as well as the ability to learn and make decisions. The image of the specially formatted envelopes are captured by a frame grabber and processed by an image processing software called WiT. Pre-processing consists of region of interest (ROI) identification, noise reduction, image centring and size normalisation. Feature extraction is used to reduce the size of the input to the neural network and yet retaining the information of the image. The Fuzzy ARTMAP neural network performs recognition of the digit. With proper training of the network, it can be shown that the Fuzzy ARTMAP neural network is capable to recognise the hand-written postcodes for automatic mail sorting. A prototype mail sorting machine has been successfully designed and developed at CAIRO, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.