New OCR engine architecture

To read handwritten or machine-printed addresses on postal items using OCR technique requires more complicated and massive processing than postcode reading. Consequently, the processor capacity for OCR function largely affects processing speed and reading performance of the system. This paper introduces NEPLOS (NEC's Pipelined-parallel OCR System) applying new OCR system. This new architecture of parallel processing OCR engines has been introduced to Japanese address reading OCR which can read handwritten and machine-printed addresses with processing speed of more than 32,000 items/hour and postcodes with processing speed of more than 50,000 items/hour. Moreover, there can be 127 OCR engines at maximum in a system