Use of character recognition and syntax in locating address paragraphs in complex documents

An address paragraph consists of several lines (sentences) of text. Each sentence consists of numbers, words and phrases that identify a meaningful geographical region. Addresses are typically present in documents such as postal envelopes, business cards, facsimile cover pages-where there exist other text and graphics. The problem considered is that of segmenting the subimage corresponding to the address paragraph from the entire document image. Previous approaches to locating address paragraphs, primarily for postal envelopes, have avoided use of character and word information and focused on global features. The authors present a new method based on using character recognition and address syntax. In this approach, the core problem is formulated as a consistent labeling problem based on syntactic features. The proposed method has been implemented for locating the destination address block on machine-printed letter mail. Experimental results with 2000 images of letter mail are indicated