Background removal for check processing using morphology
Yimei Ding, Fumitaka Kimura, Minoru Okada, M. Shridhar, John W. V. Miller · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
In this paper the authors present two methods to extract handwritten components from a personal bank check. The first technique utilizes a blank check image designated as the reference image and a filled-in check image designated as the sample image. These checks differ only at specific regions of the check reserved for insertion of handwritten or machine printed components. A technique called morphological subtraction is used to extract the user-entered components. However, because the background patterns of reference image and sample images will not be identical, an affine transform is used to ensure better alignment between the two images. To eliminate the need for a blank check of every kind, a second method is proposed that uses grayscale morphology to extract the handwritten information. Because some background features are similar to the user-entered information, some residual background information is likely to be present in the processed image; however these can be removed with post processing.