An Efficient off-Line Handwritten Japanese Address Recognition System

Handwritten address recognition is very practical and popular in ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) application field, especially for postal and express service. The structure of Japanese address has three components: high level, middle level and low level address. The high level and middle level address is very useful in postal applications since they indicate the destination of the express freight car. However, it's not easy to achieve high recognition accuracy on handwritten address merely by general ICR engine. In this paper, an efficient handwritten Japanese address recognition system is proposed that combines general ICR engine and special processing functions. Rough recognition result is obtained from a general ICR engine based on over-segmentation strategy. Special processing for precise address correction contains three main functions: FCN-based middle level address detection and recognition, BK-Tree-based high level address candidates searching and DTW-based accurate high level address matching. In the experiments on 670 handwritten Japanese address images, the proposed method successfully divided the total address into three levels, and achieved string-level correct rates of 81.6% and 72.5% in high level and middle level address respectively.