Address location on envelopes

Abstract In automatic postal address reading systems, the inability of the system to locate the address block correctly contributes significantly to the error rate. Envelopes often contain much extraneous printed information in addition to the address. The ideal approach to address location would be to read all this information and identify the address field by its semantic content; but it would be computationally expensive to implement a full-envelope character reading capability. This paper describes an alternative approach, which segments the envelope into regions of consistent print style and chooses a region most likely to be the address on grounds of position, size, print style, etc. without attempting to read the characters.