Automatic recognition of handwritten data on cheques: Fact or fiction?

Handwriting recognition and document processing are formidable tasks, and the recognition of the different data fields such as courtesy amount, legal amount, date, payee and signature, are advancing at different paces. After examining the problems involved and the facts, this paper focuses on one of the most challenging parts of a cheque recognition system, i.e., the segmentation and recognition of the date written on the cheques. It mimics humans in segmenting a date image, and two separators are used to detect the `Year', `Day' and `Month' zones based on shape and spatial features. Experiments have been conducted on a test set of 809 cheques with diverse colour designs and languages, with encouraging results. Apart from the above, this paper also analyses the outstanding issues in this growing field, and attempts to provide some pointers and solutions. Copyright © 1999 Elsevier.