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.
N. Srihari (Sargur Narasimhamurthy Srihari) is an American Computer scientist and educator who has made contributions to the field of pattern recognition.
Sargur Srihari | Sargur | Method used for exploiting contextual information in the first '''handwritten address interpretation''' system developed by Sargur Srihari |