Integration of hand-written address interpretation technology into the United States Postal Service Remote Computer Reader system

Hand-written address interpretation (HWAI) technology has been recently incorporated into the processing of letter mail by the US Postal Service. The Remote Bar Coding System, which is an image management system for assigning bar codes to mail that has not been fully processed by postal OCR equipment, has been retrofitted with a Remote Computer Reader (RCR), into which the HWAI technology is integrated. A description of the HWAI technology, including its algorithms for the control structure, recognizers and databases, is provided. Its performance on more than a million hand-written mail-pieces in a field deployment of the integrated RCR-HWAI system is indicated. Future enhancements for a nationwide deployment of the system are indicated