Remote Bar Coding System (RBCS), also called Remote Video Encoding (RVE) is a method used by the United States Postal Service during mail sorting to encode the address of letter-sized mailpieces that are not decipherable by a Multiline Optical Character Reader (MLOCR).
If this does not succeed, human operators visually examine the image and enter the address.
The Remote Bar Coding System consists of hundreds of MLOCR machines, which capture an image of mailpieces throughout the USPS network, the communications hardware and software that transmit this data to the "remote" site, the specialized hardware and software that initially attempt to interpret the image, and the terminals and human operators that encode the most difficult images.
The algorithms in this system are continually improved by incorporating the results of human operators.
Furthermore, successive generations of MLOCR hardware and software would incorporate some of the advances made in computer-based Remote Encoding, in order to minimize the number of mailpieces that need to go through this extra step.