Automated Reading of Cheque Amounts

Abstract:

This paper describes a complete system for the automated reading of amounts extracted from bank and postal cheques. We focus our description on the steps where we developed and applied new techniques. These are the reading of the legal amount and the cross-validation of the recognition results for the legal and courtesy amount. In our work we deal with German cheque amounts. The reading of German legal amounts is a special challenge, since the literal words the legal amount is constructed of are usually completely connected. For the cross-validation step, we present a well structured combination strategy that allows detecting and correcting recognition errors for the legal and courtesy amount and leads to a significant increase in the system performance. Our system was tested on a database with real cheques from Swiss postal services.