Lacunarity as a texture measure for address block segmentation

Abstract

In this paper, an approach based on lacunarity to locate address blocks in postal envelopes is proposed. After computing the lacunarity of a postal envelope image, a non-linear transformation is applied on it. A thresholding technique is then used to generate evidences. Finally, a region growing is applied to reconstruct semantic objects like stamps, postmarks, and address blocks. Very little a priori knowledge of the envelope images is required. By using the lacunarity for several ranges of neighbor window sizes r onto 200 postal envelope images, the proposed approach reached a success rate over than 97% on average. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.