Recognition of legal amounts on bank cheques

This article describes the recognition of legal amounts of a bank cheque processing system developed at CENPARMI. The preprocessing, sentence to word segmentation and word recognition approaches are presented along with some critical reviews. The overall engine is a combination of a global feature scheme with an HMM module. The global features consist of the encoding of the relative position of the ascenders, descenders and loops within a word. The HMM uses one feature set based on the orientation of contour points: as well as their distance to the baselines. Our system is fully trainable, reducing to a strict minimum the number of hand-set parameters. The system is also modular and independent of specific languages as we have to deal with at least two languages in Canada, namely English and French. The system can be easily adapted to read other European languages based on the Roman alphabet. The system is continuously tested on data from the local phone company, and we report here the results on a balanced French database of approximately 2000 cheques with specified amounts.