Analysis of address layout on Japanese handwritten mail-a hierarchical process of hypothesis verification

This paper describes a new method for analyzing Japanese mail layout. We first classify the many kinds of variations in Japanese mail layout into format variations, extraneous object variations, and arrangement variations of destination address characters. These variations are cyclically dependent on one another, but have insufficient information to fix other variations. To solve these problems, we developed an address layout analysis method using a hierarchical hypothesis verification process, which consists of a format determination process and a destination address character line detection process, hierarchically. This method increased the correct address format determination rate by 5.8% to 86.6% and the correct destination address character line detection rate by 10.2% to 92.8% for 1482 test pieces of mail. This method is practically applied to Japanese mail sorting machine