Recognition of handwritten foreign mail

Foreign Mail Recognition(FMR) is part of the more general problem of recognizing destination addresses in a mail stream. It is defined as the problem of finding the country of destination of a mail piece sent to a foreign address. In this paper we discuss some of the differences between FMR and Domestic Mail Recognition(DMR) and present its specific challenges. Two complementary baseline algorithms that use heuristics in combining word, character and digit recognizers are presented. Their performance is improved by reducing the search space for the address elements using address configuration distributions. Preliminary results are presented.