Comprehensive Check Image Reader

Abstract

A check contains more than just an amount. The fields of interests are courtesy and legal amounts, date, check number, MICR line, payer, payee, memo, signature, signature instruction, fractional validation numbers, endorsement, security features, etc. In fact a bank can literally construct a very meaningful profile of the account holder from an analysis of the checks written and received by an account holder. Since October 2005 the "Check 21" law defines an image of a check as being as valid as the original document. The agreement between banks is that a binary image 200-240 dpi is the most practical format to use. Since most banks are now creating images and must be able to handle incoming images it creates a need for new image tools to validate the quality and readability of each field. This paper describes the challenges in finding and recognizing the fields of interest on the broad document types. These fields contain machine printed and handwritten words. The remaining of the paper would focus on handwritten legal line recognition which remains the most challenging field