Automatic Reading of Handwritten Amounts on French Checks

We describe an implemented system which reads amounts on French checks images. This system is made of two modules which recognize independently the courtesy and the legal amount. The first one is based on a segmentation-by-recognition approach while the second uses hidden Markov models of words. The outputs of these two modules are combined into a system decision. A high reliability is achieved through this combination since the errors made by the recognition modules should be mostly uncorrelated.