Removal of Background Patterns and Signatures for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition of Checks

This paper describes a method to extract the magnetic ink characters (MICR E-13B font) printed on bank-checks for the purpose of using OCR as supporting MICR. In the case of OCR, the colorful background patterns and the overlapped signatures on MICR characters make it difficult to extract characters respectively by using simple binarization and labeling. Our method estimates the color and pitch of MICR characters in order to separate the characters in contact with sign strokes, then the remaining sign strokes are removed by tracing them. In the experiment, we use circulated bank-checks and samples provided by SEIKO EPSON and show the performance of our method.