Abstract
In this paper, we propose a simple segmentation approach for camera-captured Chinese envelope images. We first apply a moving-window thresholding algorithm, which is less curvature-biased and less sensitive to noise than other local thresholding methods, to generate binary images. Then the skew images are corrected by using a skew detection and correction algorithm. In the following stage rectangular frames on the envelopes containing postcode are removed by using opening operators in mathematical morphology. Finally, a post-processing procedure is used to remove remaining thin lines. In this stage, connected components are labeled. We test 800 camera-captured envelope images in our experiments, including handwritten and machine-printed envelopes. For almost all of these images, the proposed approach can accurately separate the address block, stamp and postmark from the background.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Lu, Y., Tan, C.L., Shi, P., Zhang, K.: Segmentation of Handwritten Chinese Characters from Destination Addresses of Mail Pieces. International journal of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence 16, 85–96 (2002)
Menoti, D., Borges, D.L., Facon, J., de Souza Britto Jr., A.: Segmentation of Postal Envelopes for Address Block Location: an approach based on feature selection in wavelet space. In: Proceedings of Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 699–703 (2003)
Yonekura, E.A., Facon, J.: Postal Envelope Segmentation by 2-D Histogram Clustering through Watershed Transform. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, vol. 1, pp. 338–342 (2003)
Menoti, D., Borges, D.L., et al.: Salient Features and Hypothesis Testing: evaluating a novel approach for segmentation and address block location. In: International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop, vol. 3, pp. 26–33 (2003)
Legal-Ayala, H.A., Facon, J., Barán, B.: Postal Envelope Segmentation using Learning-Based Approach. CLEI Electron. J. 11 (2008)
Wu, S., Amin, A.: Automatic thresholding of gray-level using multistage approach. In: Proceedings of Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, vol. 1, pp. 493–497 (2003)
Otsu, N.: A threshold selection method from gray-level histogram. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 9, 62–66 (1979)
Kittler, J., Illingworth, J., Foglein, J.: Threshold selection based on a simple image statistic. Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, 125–147 (1985)
Niblack, W.: An Introduction to Digital Image Processing, pp. 115–116. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1986)
Sauvola, J., Pietikainen, M.: Adaptive Document Image Binarization. Pattern Recognition 33, 225–236 (2000)
Yanowitz, S.D., Bruckstein, A.M.: A new method for image segmentation. In: Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 270–275 (1988)
Liang, J., Doermann, D., Li, H.: Camera-based analysis of text and documents: a survey. In: IJDAR, vol. 7, pp. 84–104 (2005)
Trier, O., Jain, A.: Goal Directed Evaluation of Binarization Methods. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1191–1201 (1995)
Trier, O., Taxt, T.: Evaluation of binarization methods for document images. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 312–315 (1995)
Wilkinson, H.F.M., et al.: Blood vessel segmentation using moving-window robust automatic threshold selection. In: International Conference on Image Processing, Barcelona, vol. 2, pp. 1093–1096 (2003)
Gatos, B., Pratikakis, I., Perantonis, S.J.: An Adaptive Binarization Technique for Low Quality Historical Documents. In: Marinai, S., Dengel, A.R. (eds.) DAS 2004. LNCS, vol. 3163, pp. 102–113. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Wilkinson, M.H.F.: Optimizing edge detectors for robust automatic threshold selection: coping with edge curvature and noise. In: GMIP, pp. 385–401 (1998)
Ye, X., Cheriet, M., Suen, C.Y., Liu, K.: Extraction of bankcheck items by mathematical morphology. In: IJDAR, vol. 2, pp. 53–66 (1999)
Yu, Z., Dong, J., Wei, Z., Shen, J.: A Fast Image Rotation Algorithm for Optical Character Recognition of Chinese Documents. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems, pp. 485–489 (2006)
Serra, J.: Image Analysis and Mathematical Morphology. Academic Press, London (1982)
Said, J.N.: Automatic Processing of Documents and Bank Cheques. In: PhD thesis, Concordia University (1998)
Chang, F., Chen, C.-J.: A component-labeling algorithm using contour tracing technique. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, vol. 2, pp. 741–745 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dong, X., Dong, J., Wang, S. (2009). Segmentation of Chinese Postal Envelope Images for Address Block Location. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5876. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10520-3_53
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10520-3_53
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10519-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10520-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)