Address Block Location Using Color and Texture Analysis

Address block location on mail pieces is an important task in postal automation. Unlike personal or business letters which have high degree of global spatial structure among a limited number of entities, mail pieces of magazines usually have an address block printed on a white label which can be pasted in an arbitrary position. Graphics and other printed text on magazine covers also make the address block location problem complicated. In this paper, we present a simple method for automatically locating the address block on color magazine covers based on both color and texture analysis. First, we use a simple color thresholding technique to extract white regions which may contain an address block. Then, a texture segmentation method based on Gabor filters is used to find text regions (including the address) inside the white regions. These text regions are candidates for the address block. Simple heuristics are used to identify the correct address block among these candidates. This method is invariant to rotation and scale of the magazine cover. Experimental results on low resolution (50 dpi) images of several magazine covers are provided to demonstrate the applicability of our method.