Automatic Segmentation and Recognition of Bank Cheque Fields

This paper describes a novel method for automatically segmenting and recognizing the various information fields present on a bank cheque. The uniqueness of our approach lies in the fact that it doesn’t necessitate any prior information and requires minimum human intervention. The extraction of segmented fields is accomplished by means of a connectivity based approach. For the recognition part, we have proposed four innovative features, namely; entropy, energy, aspect ratio and average fuzzy membership values. Though no particular feature is pertinent in itself but a combination of these is used for differentiating between the fields. Finally, a fuzzy neural network is trained to identify the desired fields. The system performance is quite promising on a large dataset of real and synthetic cheque images.