Address block location on complex mail pieces

Abstract

Unlike simple letter envelopes which have a high degree of global spatial structure among a limited number of entities, many mail pieces such as magazines usually have an address block printed on a label which can be pasted in an arbitrary position and orientation among text, graphics and images on a magazine cover, which is often shrink wrapped. This work concentrates on address block location for complex mail pieces with an arbitrary layout of printed entities. Using a bottom-up approach, a pyramid model is created for the address block. Based on this model, some features are extracted for assigning a confidence value to the located address blocks. The typical processing time for locating a destination address block is 0.1 seconds on a SGI Indy workstation.