HN Request: How does address recognition work?

1 pointXcelerate1 comment

Does anyone know of a good article on how addresses are recognized on envelopes? This goes far beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) as everyone's handwriting is vastly different, and often unreadable.

Neural networks maybe?

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I remember reading once that they start by taking an image of the envelope, finding the zip and numerical portion of the address, then searching their database for possible matches where the numerical portion is within a particular zip. Once it has a list of possible matches the system then starts comparing the address on the image to possible matches within the list of returned matches.

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