System for automatically reading IATA flight coupons

This paper describes a prototype system for reading IATA flight coupons. The system exploits various characteristics of IATA coupons to determine reliably coupon types and field boundaries, and to minimize the amount of manual keying. In particular, we propose a method for extracting and recognizing fixed-pitch characters on noisy images with complex background. The method does not require a complete drop-out of background, pre-printed text, or lines before recognition, and allows for recovering partially damaged characters (e.g., overlap with form content, handwritten annotations, etc.).