The Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) is a research laboratory at the University at Buffalo,

State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...

. The center was established with funding from the

United States Postal Service The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the U ...

and

National Institute of Justice The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the research, development and evaluation agency of the United States Department of Justice. NIJ, along with the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Juvenil ...

. CEDAR was formalized by the

by Postmaster General Anthony Frank in 1991.The primary goal of CEDAR was to conduct research and development for developing software useful for the automation of postal sorting equipment. Work at CEDAR, with Sargur Srihari as principal investigator, led to the first handwritten address interpretation system in the world.S. N. Srihari and E. J. Keubert
"Integration of handwritten address interpretation technology into the United States Postal Service Remote Computer Reader System"
Proc. Int. Conf. Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 1997, IEEE-CS Press, pp. 892-896 CEDAR-FOX, the first system for automatic comparison of handwriting for the purpose of forensic analysis, was developed at CEDAR.

Handwritten Analysis Interpretation

HandWritten Address Interpretation is a software system developed at CEDAR. Known as HWAI, it was first deployed by the

through its contractor Lockheed-Martin in Tampa, Florida during the holiday December season in 1997. Initially 10% of the handwritten mail was successfully sorted and the project was considered a success. This was due to the large volume of mail that the US Postal Service processes and the cost of labor involved. The key to the success was the discovery of a heuristic by researchers Sargur Srihari and Jonathan Hull that the street number and ZIP code could be relatively easily recognized, because they only consist of numerals, which could then be used to constrain the possible street. Subsequent improvements to HWAI led to a 45% sort rate with a 2% error rate. Today more than 95% of the handwritten mail is sorted automatically. Versions of HWAI were developed for

Australia Post Australia Post, formally the Australian Postal Corporation, is the government business enterprise that provides postal services in Australia. The head office of Australia Post is located in Bourke Street, Melbourne, which also serves as a post o ...

and UK Royal Mail.

References

External links

CEDAR Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Center Of Excellence For Document Analysis And Recognition University at Buffalo