Udo Miletzki

Continuous learning systems: postal address readers with built-in learning capability

While current postal address readers have been adapted and fine tuned once and off-line in a central development lab, the concept of next generation readers presented here will contain a built-in learning capability which can be referred to as continuous learning from letters. This will be performed on different levels of reading and comprehension, enabling the system to adapt itself to slow changes of mail mix and writing conventions. Preconditions of an adaptive reading system are discussed and an outline of such a system is given, which not only keeps track, with the slow changes of input, but also optimizes itself to sire specific conditions, thus guaranteeing an optimal solution at each site and at any time within life cycle. The system presented here is funded by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the projects READ and ADAPTIVE READ.

Character recognition in practice today and tomorrow

An outline of todays state of the art OCR technology is given with its most important approaches from single character recognition to holistic word recognition and the co-evolution of hardware technology and pattern recognition capabilities is shown. The relation between font design and the design of an omnifont recognition system is illustrated. The economic relevance of todayss OCR technology is discussed. The article concludes with reflections about future trends in the OCR field such as growing complexity of patterns and knowledge bases in OCR applications.

How Postal Address Readers Are Made Adaptive

In the following chapter we describe how a postal address reader is made adaptive. A postal address reader is a huge application, so we concentrate on technologies used to adapt it to a few important tasks. In particular, we describe adaptation strategies for the detectors and classifiers of regions of interest (ROI), for the classifiers for single character recognition, for a hidden Markov recogniser for hand written words and for the address dictionary of the reader. The described techniques have been deployed in all postal address reading applications, including parcel, flat, letter and in-house mail sorting.

Genesis of postal address reading, current state and future prospects: thirty years of pattern recognition on duty of postal services

Abstract Intro: An overview is given of the largest industrial OCR application world wide: Postal Address Reading, how it came into being, how it evolved rapidly to its current state-of-the-art and what are its future prospects. Some prominent historical-, system-, methodological-, cultural- and social aspects are illuminated.