ADDRESS BLOCK LOCATION USING COLOR AND TEXTURE ANALYSIS

Address block location on mail pieces in an important task in postal a utomation. Unlike personal or business letters which have high degree of global spatial structure among a limited number of entities, mail p ieces of magazines usually have an address block printed on a white la bel which can be pasted in an arbitrary position. Graphics and other p rinted text on magazine covers also make the address block location pr oblem complicated. In this paper, we present a simple method for autom atically locating the address block on color magazine covers based on both color and texture analysis. First, we use a simple color threshol ding technique to extract white regions which may contain an address b lock. Then, a texture segmentation method based on Gabor filters is us ed to find text regions (including the address) inside the white regio ns. These text regions are candidates for the address block. Simple he uristics are used to identify the correct address block among these ca ndidates. This method is invariant to rotation and scale of the magazi ne cover. Experimental results on low resolution (50 dpi) images of se veral magazine covers are provided to demonstrate the applicability of our method. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.