Syntactic and contextual post-processing of handwritten addresses for optical character recognition

An optical character recognition (OCR) system is developed for recognizing handwritten and handprinted addresses which include a British postcode written within character boxes. The system makes use of syntactic information concerning postcodes and a postcode database which interacts with the character recognition process to ensure that only valid postcodes are recognized. Postulated valid postcodes are then verified using semantic features of the remainder of the address, to produce a final postcode which both matches the input characters and is compatible with the remainder of the address. Preliminary results are presented to show how the initial stages of syntactic verification can improve character recognition performance