Patent ID: 6947574

Claim:
A computer-based method for use in accordance with an automatic mail sorting machine, the method comprising the steps of: scanning a piece of post mail in accordance with an address block locating (ABL) system for locating one or more address blocks on the piece of post mail; analyzing the one or more located address blocks in accordance with an optical character recognition (OCR) system; determining at least one confidence value, for each of the one or more located address blocks, associated with at least one of: (i) address block format characteristics; (ii) data retrievable by a sort plan associated with a site of the automatic mail sorting machine; and (iii) postmark information retrievable from a postmark; and providing a coupling between the ABL system and the OCR system capable of feeding one or more results associated with the ABL system as an input to the OCR system and one or more results associated with the OCR system as an input to the ABL system.