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US 11,373,388 B2Granted
Persistent feature based image rotation and candidate region of interest
AssigneeUnited States Postal Service
InventorRyan J. Simpson
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Embodiments of a system and method for sorting and delivering articles in a processing facility based on image data are described. Image processing results such as rotation notation information may be included in or with an image to facilitate downstream processing such as when the routing information cannot be extracted from the image using an unattended system and the image is passed to an attended image processing system. The rotation notation information may be used to dynamically adjust the image before presenting the image via the attended image processing system.
Claims21
A computer-implemented method comprising:
- under control of one or more processors,
- obtaining an image of a mail piece on a conveyor, the image showing address information affixed thereto;
- receiving, from an optical character recognition (OCR) system, an OCR result comprising (i) an electronic text record of characters of the address information shown in the image, and (ii) rotation information for the image including a rotation angle, the rotation information identifying a number of degrees the image should be rotated to show characters of the address information from left to right with the characters in a standardized orientation;
- determining that the electronic text record does not include a set of characters of the address information;
- in response to determining that the electronic text record does not include the set of characters of the address information, adding the rotation angle to an image file of the image of the mail piece to generate an enhanced image;
- transmitting the enhanced image for additional processing in a computing device;
- and
- rotating, at the computing device, the enhanced image by the rotation angle prior to additional processing by the computing device,
- wherein the rotation angle is dynamically generated based on a relationship between a maximum pixel density and an average pixel density for a row or a column, and
- wherein the relationship is expressed as Equation (1) below:
- rotation
-
- =
- 30
- *
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- -
- density
- w
- -
- max
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- Equation
-
-
- (
- 1
- )
- where densityw-max is the maximum density for a row of the image;
- and
- densityw-avg is the average density for the rows of the image.
34 more elements
A computer-implemented method comprising:
- under control of one or more processors,
- receiving an image showing an item and address information affixed thereto;
- generating an electronic text record of the address information based on an optical character recognition (OCR) processing of at least a portion of the image showing the address information;
- detecting orientation information for the image based on pixel information included in the image, the orientation information including a rotation angle;
- determining that additional processing of the image is needed to identify routing information for the item based at least in part on the electronic text record;
- in response to determining that the additional processing of the image is needed, adding the rotation angle to an image file of the image to generate an enhanced image;
- transmitting the enhanced image for additional processing in a computing device;
- and
- rotating, at the computing device, the enhanced image by the rotation angle prior to the additional processing by the computing device,
- wherein the rotation angle is dynamically generated based on a relationship between a maximum pixel density and an average pixel density for a row or a column and
- wherein the relationship is expressed as Equation (1) below:
- rotation
-
- =
- 30
- *
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- -
- density
- w
- -
- max
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- Equation
-
-
- (
- 1
- )
- where densityw-max is the maximum density for a row of the image;
- and
- densityw-avg is the average density for the rows of the image.
35 more elements
An item processing system comprising:
- a scanning device configured to acquire an image of an item at a first processing device;
- an unattended image processing server configured to:
- generate an electronic text record of address information shown in the image based on an optical character recognition (OCR) processing of at least a portion of the image, the OCR processing configured to detect orientation information of the image, the orientation information including a rotation angle
- determine that additional processing of the image is needed to identify routing information for the item based at least in part on the electronic text record,
- in response to determining that the additional processing of the image is needed, add the rotation angle to an image file of the image to generate an enhanced image, and
- transmit the enhanced image to an attended image processing workstation;
- and the attended image processing workstation configured to:
- receive the enhanced image,
- identify a display orientation for the enhanced image,
- rotate the enhanced image based on a difference between the display orientation and the rotation angle,
- display the enhanced image as adjusted on a display device,
- receive an address information input for the enhanced image, and
- transmit the address information input to the unattended image processing server,
- wherein the unattended image processing server is further configured to transmit a processing equipment control message to a second processing device to route the item to a location associated with the address information, and
- wherein the unattended image processing server is configured to dynamically generate the rotation angle based on a relationship between a maximum pixel density and an average pixel density for a row or a column, and
- wherein the relationship is expressed as Equation (1) below:
- rotation
-
- =
- 30
- *
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- -
- density
- w
- -
- max
- density
- w
- -
- avg
- Equation
-
-
- (
- 1
- )
- where densityw-max is the maximum density for a row of the image;
- and
- densityw-avg is the average density for the rows of the image.
40 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.