A Knowledge-Based System for Address Block Location on Korean Envelope Images

우리나라 우편 봉투 영상에서의 주소 영역 추추을 위한 지식 기반 시스템

In this paper,we propose a knowledge-based system for locating Destination Address Block(DAB) by analyzing the structure of Korean envelope images. In the proposed system the preprocessing steps such as adaptive binarization connected component extraction and deskewing are carried out first for the effective structure analysis of the envelope image. Then DAB containing address name and zipcode parts of the input envelope image is extracted by an iterative procedure based on the knowledge acquired from the statistical feature analysis of the various envelope images. Most of the system for slocating address blocks on envelopes have extracted DAB by segmenting an envelope image into several candidate blocks followed by selecting one among the candidate blocks. Because it is very difficult to segment a Korean envelope image into several blocks due to the specific writing habits that the addresses on the envelope are written in close proximity to each other the proposed iterative procedure determines DAB by splitting or merging the connected components and verifies the determined DAB without segmentation and selection. Experiments with a great number of the live envelopes provided from Seoul Mail Center in Koorea were carried out. The results reveal that the proposed system is very effective for address block location on Korean envelopes.