Automatic detection of change in address blocks for reply forms processing

In this paper, an automatic method to detect the presence of on-line erasures/scribbles/corrections/over-writing in the address block of various types of subscription and utility payment forms is presented. The proposed approach employs bottom-up segmentation of the address block. Heuristic rules based on structural features are used to automate the detection process. The algorithm is applied on a large dataset of 5,780 real world document forms of 200 dots per inch resolution. The proposed algorithm performs well with an average processing time of 108 milliseconds per document with a detection accuracy of 98.96%

Detection and Recognition of Erasures in On-Line Captured Paper Forms

International audienceThis paper presents a method to automatically locate and recognize erasures in on-line captured handwritten documents in order to avoid a subsequent misrecognition of characters and words. We offer a comprehensive definition of the ambiguous concept of erasure in handwriting that results in a more accurate characterization of the different types of erasures. Thanks to this characterization, a preprocessing step, placed upstream of the word recognition engine, enables to classify through an MLP each couple of connected strokes as being an erasure or not using a low-level feature set. We evaluate our system on a real handwritten document database and show how our system can be tuned to operate in accordance with various recognition engines thus leading to high performance in erasure detection and recognition