A Model for the Electronic Representation of Bank Checks

The substitution of physical bank check exchange by electronic check image transfer brings agility, security and cost reduction to the clearing system. In this paper, we propose a model for the electronic representation of bank checks based on the mixed raster content (MRC) model for compression of color and gray-scale images. The binary image is sent first and only if necessary the other MRC image planes are sent to reconstruct the color image of the check. Careful subjective evaluation helped us indicate the best binarization technique and studies led us to use JPEG 2000 to compress the MRC image planes. Furthermore, we propose a new watermarking technique to embed a digital signature into the check image for protection.