METHOD FOR LOCATING THE POSITION AND ORIENTATION OF A FIDUCIARY MARK

摘要

Fiduciary mark detection system usable with an over-the-belt optical character recognition (OCR) reader for ascertaining the position and orientation of text within the destination address on parcels moving along a conveyor, comprising charged coupled device (CCD) array, analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, general purpose computer, and software program. Image processing software program comprising projection histograms, convolution filtering, correlation, radial variance, first moments of inertia, edge image analysis, Hough method, detection confidence testing. Orientation defining mark comprising fluorescent ink placed approximately in the center of the destination address block on a parcel is non obstructive of the underlying text and may be affixed to parcel any time prior to scanning. Fiduciary mark comprising two circles of different diameter oriented such that a vector from the center of large circle to center of small circle is oriented in the same direction as underlying text.