A method for street number matching in Japanese address recognition

A method for street number matching in Japanese address recognition is presented. This method uses the knowledge about the number expression formats, which is represented by the expression patterns of street numbers. The expression patterns are composed of character class symbols which represent numerals and delimiter characters. By matching the expression patterns against the character candidates in the lattice which is the result of character recognition, the class symbol lattice is generated. In the class symbol lattice, the numeral and delimiter character candidates are replaced by the corresponding class symbol. An experiment using 6,136 expression patterns showed that 93% of street numbers on the test mail-pieces were correctly recognized.