Image-understanding approach to reading business transaction documents
Louis A. Oddo, James F. McNamara, Robert W. M. Smith · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
One high-payoff applications of image character recognition (ICR) technology is the automatic processing of business transaction documents. For remittance types of transactions, these documents consist of checks and invoices. While the general layout of a check is consistent with respect to types of data fields present, there is variability in the locations of the data fields printed on the document. Furthermore, checks are printed using multiple fonts, character sizes, and line spacing on a single document. In contrast, invoice contents and layouts vary widely from business to business. The high degree of layout variability of business documents poses significant problems with respect to data field location and extraction in preparation for ICR. This paper describes an image understanding approach for locating and extracting data fields from various business documents. This approach is shown to be tolerant to image rotation, multiple fonts, multiple character sizes, and line spacing. Actual checks and invoices are processed using the described algorithms. The resulting field isolation and extraction performance, together with the resulting ICR read rates, are statistically analyzed and presented.