The A2iA Intercheque System: Courtesy Amount and Legal Amount Recognition for French Checks

Abstract

We developed a check reading system, termed INTERCHEQUE, which recognizes both the legal (LAR) and the courtesy amount (CAR) on bank checks. The version presented here is designed for the recognition of French, omni-bank, omni-scriptor, handwritten bank checks, and meets industrial requirements, such as high processing speed, robustness, and extremely low error rates. We give an overview of our recognition system and discuss some of the pattern recognition techniques used. We also describe an installation which processes of the order of 70,000 checks per day. Results on a data base of about 170,000 checks show a recognition rate of about 75% for an error rate of the order of 1/10,000 checks.

Industrial bank check processing: the A2iA CheckReaderTM

“…It is able to recognize both courtesy and legal amounts on various types of payment documents: handwritten personal or business checks, machine-printed checks, deposit tickets, credit/debit forms, money transfer orders, travelers checks, etc. Figure 3 shows the current organization of the system which is currently different from what has been reported in our previous papers [12,19]. As can be seen from Fig.…”

“…The traditional recognition rate is not a sufficient quality measure for a soft recognizer: it characterizes just the quality of the top candidate, while other members of the list remain unutilized. Instead, we use an information-based criterion of recognition quality [11,19]. It is possible to prove that maximum information on correct classification is contained in such a list, whose members are estimates of posterior class probabilities.…”

“…The character recognizer consists of four OCRs that recognize segmented character images [19]. Then, OCR results are integrated to obtain final scores of character classes.…”

“…Four complementary OCRs recognize these characters, then the recognition results of all OCRs are integrated producing a list of class candidates with associated probability estimates [11,19] (see also Sect. 3).…”

“…Recent publications devoted to various aspects of check processing are [1,17,18,20,27,31]. Engineering Correspondence to: N. Gorski bank check recognition systems are presented in [7,9,14,19,21,26]. As far as we know, some of these systems are commercially available and are in real use [9,12,18].…”