Location and recognition of legal amounts on Chinese bank cheques

This paper describes a Chinese cheque processing system currently under development at the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI). The information on Chinese bank cheques is not the same as that on alphanumeric bank cheques. The legal amount in a Chinese bank cheque is the Chinese character text associated with each currency unit. This paper discusses a technique using each currency unit as a key word to locate/extract the legal amount in bank cheques. In the analysis and recognition process, the system tries to locate the smallest currency units in the image and identifies it first. Then, the system tries to locate the image strings associated with each currency unit. Each image string is separated and recognized. Next, a set of rules and context are applied to recognize the characters. In order to choose the correct one, the recognized character string is accepted only if it satisfies all the conditions governed by rules.