RESULTS FROM A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF HANDWRITTEN ADDRESS RECOGNITION SYSTEMS FOR THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

For a cost­incentive­based procurement (known as HIP), the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) developed a methodology to predict the recognition performance of Remote Computer Reader (RCR) systems for handwritten letter mail. Very high volumes of mail in the United States mean that slight changes in mail piece finalization and error rates have substantial cost consequences. Thus, high measurement precision and carefully truthed data are required. Because of considerable regional and seasonal variability in address quality, the HIP evaluation required large, representative databases of images and confirmation using high volumes of live­mail. At least four RCR versions were evaluated in HIP. In comparison to a baseline RCR system, the final HIP RCR system achieved the considerable gain of approximately 33 percent in the finalization rate for an image database, while reducing the error rate to about 2.5 percent. Live­mail measurements from 25 diverse sites corroborated the database results and illustrated the high variability in address quality and consequent recognition performance. USPS 'testing confirmed that evaluation with sufficiently large and representative databases is an effective means for predicting performance on live­mail