Facing and Orienting Mail

When a mail piece enters a postal facility, it must first be faced and oriented, i.e., physically manipulated so that it is right side up with its front side facing forward. The USPS Advanced Facer Canceller System (AFCS) faces domestic mail pieces by looking for fluorescing indicia on each mail piece. Jams, misplaced indicia, and partially fluorescing indicia cause the AFCS to reject a significant number of mail pieces. Previously, domestic mail pieces rejected by the AFCS were faced and oriented by hand. In addition, all mail received from foreign countries had to be faced and oriented by hand, because that mail does not have fluorescing indicia and is therefore unsuitable for processing by the AFCS.

SRI has circumvented these problems by developing software that processes images of both sides of each mail piece and automatically determines, in real time, which side is the front of the mail piece and whether the mail piece is right side up or upside down. SRI technology computes image-based factors such as text justification, the position of stamp-like areas, the presence or absence of barcodes and text resembling a return address. The results are then used to efficiently face and orient the mail (an example is shown in Figure 1). Field tests, with 200 ms of processing time for each mail piece, demonstrated a 90% acceptance rate and 8% misclassification rate for domestic mail; and an 80% acceptance rate and 10% misclassification rate for foreign mail. With a goal of saving 500,000 labor hours a year, the USPS began nationwide deployment of the technology in 2002.