High-performance reading machines

The architecture of a reading machine designed to achieve a high rate of correct interpretation of text as well as high speed in performing the interpretation is described. The refinement of the architecture for a specialized reading machine, to find and interpret addresses on a stream of postal letters, is also described. The addresses can be either machine-printed or handwritten. The primary subtasks correspond to finding the block of text corresponding to the destination address, recognizing characters and words within the address, and interpreting the text using postal directories. The need for multiple algorithms and multiple scales for recognition (holistic and analytic) and for methods for combining results of multiple algorithms, the efficacy of artificial neural nets and fuzzy matching, and the feasibility of reading unconstrained handwritten words when there exist accompanying numeric fields that limit word choices are shown