Recognition of numeric postal codes from multi-script postal address blocks

Abstract

The objective of the current work is to recognize postal codes written in Roman, Devanagari, Bangla and Arabic scripts. In the first stage 25 unique digit patterns are identified from the handwritten numeral patterns of the said four scripts. A script independent unified pattern classifier is then designed to classify any digit pattern of thesescripts into one of the 25 classes. In the next stage a rule-based script inference engine infers about the script of the numeric string, that invokes one of the four script specific classifiers. The average script-inference accuracy over a six digit numeric string is observed as 95.1% and the best recognition rates for the four script specific digit classifiers are obtained as 96.10%, 94.40%, 96.45 % and 95.60% respectively. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.