METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTERLEAVING OCR AND ABL FOR AUTOMATED MAIL SORTING

A method and system for automated sorting machines is provided in which a feedback between OCR and ABL takes place. According to a first aspect of the present invention, a loose coupling between ABL and OCR is proposed in which the ABL system is asked for a further address block potentially present on the letter's surface when the first one being passed from ABL to OCR yielded that no destination ZIP code could be extracted from it. The confidence of the actual OCR and the ABL result, the address block contents supplemented with some additional criteria based on general knowledge, further, the sort plan actually loaded on the concerned sorting machine and the postmark information found in the stamps of the postmark can advantageously be used to make the ABL restart decision. Further, the ABL system can continue to search further address blocks while the OCR system processes one or a plurality of address blocks being passed to it from ABL in a preceding procedure related to the same letter. After being processed by the OCR procedure, a summarizing ranking is calculated for each potential address block found. The best rank is given for the most probable destination address block. In this ‘tight’ coupling of ABL and OCR processes, basically the same criteria as mentioned above can be used.