Development of an Expert System for Recognizing Handwritten Dollar Amounts.

This paper presents an expert system for automatically recognizing handwritten characters of dollar amounts on personal checks. The dollar amounts composed of numerals and marks "-," "x x," etc., are freely handwritten in various formats that individuals favor, inside the amount field. Then frequently there is contact between not only horizontally adjacent characters but also vertically adjacent ones. Recognition of such unconstrained character strings handwritten by the public whose formats are undecided beforehand is a problem in optical character recognition. The system developed in this paper has the ability to segment the dollar amount image into individual characters automatically and to recognize them accurately. The recognition process of the dollar amount consists of the following steps: divide a digitized image into groups, called a "block," of line elements connected with one another, give attributes to each block by using the knowledge on arrangement patterns of characters; and segment the block into individual characters according to the attributes and recognize them. It is suggested that this system will enable the saving of considerable operator labor in check processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]