Recognition and verification of postcodes in handwritten and hand-printed addresses

An algorithmic architecture for a high-performance OCR system for hand-printed and handwritten addresses is proposed. The architecture integrates syntactic and contextual postprocessing with character recognition to optimize postcode recognition performance and verifies the postcode against simple features extracted from the remainder of the address to ensure a low error rate. An initial implementation of all parts of the proposed system is reported, showing an overall postcode recognition rate of 44% and correct extraction of verification information for 24% of upper-case addresses and 27% of mixed-case addresses.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>