On the Development of an OCR System for Indian Postal Automation: Development of a Postal Automation System based on Optical Character Recognition written in Bangla (Bengali) and Roman for India

Various problems towards the development of Indian Postal Automation (IPA) system is discussed here. More specifically, in this endeavor, some of the tasks such as, statistical analysis of Indian postal documents, bi-lingual pin code digit recognition, script identification prior to city name recognition, and Dynamic Programming (DP) based city name recognition of Bangla script are the major contributions of this work. The feature sets considered  for the work consists of Structural and Statistical features, Normalized binary pixel images, Direction code based features, Gradient based features etc. For recognition, two categories of classifiers, viz., Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Modified Quadratic Discriminant Function (MQDF) based classifiers have been selectively tested here and detailed results are presented.