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The reading of names and addresses is one of the most complex tasks in automated forms processing. This paper describes an integrated real-time system to read names and addresses on tax forms of the Internal Revenue Service of the United States. The Name and Address Block Reader (NABR) system accepts both machine-printed and handprinted address block images as input. The application software has two major steps: document analysis (connected component analysis, address block extraction, label detection, hand-print/machine-print discrimination) and document recognition. Document recognition has two non-identical streams for machine-print and hand-print; key steps are: address parsing, character recognition, word recognition and postal database lookup (ZIP+4 and City-State-ZIP les). System output is a packet containing the results of recognition together with database access status le. Real-time throughput (8,500 forms per hour) is achieved by employing a loosely-coupled multiprocessing architecture where successive input images are distributed to available address recognition processors. The functional architecture, software design, system architecture and the hardware implementation are described. Performance evaluation on machine-printed and handwritten addresses are presented.

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