Handwritten Japanese Address Recognition Technique Based on Improved Phased Search of Candidate Rectangle Lattice

In the field of handwritten Japanese address recognition, it is common to recognize place-name strings from placename images. However, in practice, it is necessary to recognize the place-name strings from address images. Therefore, we have proposed the post-processing system, which checks the list of the place-name strings in two-stages for recognizing the place-name images. In this paper, we propose a new technique based on phased search of candidate rectangle lattice, and improve the technique with the detection of key-characters for final output. Applying our proposal to the IPTP 1840 image data of address strings, the results of experiments clearly show the efficiency of our system in handwritten Japanese address recognition.