Automatic extraction of numerical sequences in handwritten incoming mail documents

In this paper, we propose a method for the automatic extraction of numerical fields in handwritten documents. The approach exploits the known syntactic structure of the numerical field to extract, combined with a set of contextual morphological features to find the best label for each connected component. Applying a Markov model based syntactic analyzer on the overall document allows to localize/extract fields of interest. Reported results on the extraction of zip codes, phone numbers and customer codes from handwritten incoming mail documents demonstrate the interest of the proposed approach.