This paper presents a system for the automated evaluation of invoices. The purpose of the system is to detect and recognize price entries of item tables in invoices. Due to the lack o f a l a yout model of all possible invoices the system is composed of several processing stages. These stages are: text stripe extraction and skew detection by a combination of mathematical morphology and heuristic search; orientation detection by a new approach called row-delta-histogram"; the optical character recognition of text stripes using a multilayer backpropagation network as a classi er and fractal based Peano features; table extraction which u s e s a genetic algorithm to adapt a suitable table row template; price entry extraction by using the context of optical character recognition. Also, the system comprises further functionalities, to name a few: reprocessing of all processing stages with di erent parameter settings, font t ypeface estimation and evaluation of divider information. The system runs as a C++ class library under the OS 2 operating system and shows encouraging recognition results.

No abstract