Patent ID: 7124130

Claim:
An address recognition apparatus for recognizing an address written on a sheet of paper, comprising: input means for receiving an image of the written address and transforming the image into computer-processable digital data; character recognizing means for recognizing a word string in the digital data on a unit character basis; word extracting means for extracting characters recognized by the character recognizing means on a unit word basis; an address word string dictionary for storing a plurality of first word strings each constructing an address in which a word arrangement order is determined; and address word string recognizing means having executable instructions for: (a) collating a second word string including a plurality of words extracted by said word extracting means and the first various word strings in said address word string dictionary, (b) determining words of the second word string respectively corresponding to the words of the first word string based on similarities between the words of the first word string and the words of the second word string, (c) evaluating each of the first word strings based on the number of words between the words of the second word string thus determined and the similarities between the words of the first word string and the words of the second word string determined, (d) recognizing one of the first word strings as the address word string; and (e) outputting the recognized first word string as the address word string representing the written address.