Post code digit recognition employing low-level features

Australian postcodes use four digits. This paper describes the recognition of handwritten postcodes on Australia Post Office approved envelopes using low-level features extracted from the scanned image. World-wide efforts have steadily improved recognition rates over the years. It has now become more difficult to significantly improve them. We have therefore been examining low-level features in the digitised image for evidence left behind from the dynamics of the writing process and for evidence from people´s individual styles of forming digits. In many of our samples we find what we have named “tags” that provide useful clues as to what the character may be. For instance, our classifier used in earlier work would often confuse the digits “6” and “0”. This more recent work shows that often a tag is formed when writing a “6” and this can be used to choose the “6” over the “0”