PREPROCESSING AND SEGMENTATION OF ADDRESS CHARACTERS O NCHINESE ENVELOPES

Abstract

To cope with the requirements of a real-time mailsorting systems, some empirical methods are proposed in this paper for the preprocessing and segmentation of hand-written of machine-printed Chinese addresses on standard envelope. The preprocessing inclueds displacement modification, skew adjustment and binarization of envelope image,and the location of address block. After preprocessing, the address block image is extracted from the envelope image. A set of isolated characters is then extracted from the address block by a proposed segmentation approach based on profile analysis and a curve-mapping function. The proposed segmentation approach contains three steps, they are component analysis, fine segmentation, and component combination. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.