BACKGROUND ELIMINATION IN BANK CHECKS USING GREYSCALE MORPHOLOGY

In this paper we propose a new method of background elimination in personal bank checks to facilitate machine recognition of user entered information. One of the key problems that affect the extraction of user entered information is the wide diversity of the backgrounds of checks. They have different patterns including scenes from nature, cartoon characters and sometimes even paintings. These backgrounds add artifacts, which are picked up by the pre-processing systems and produce errors in the later stages, culminating in erroneous recognition. This method does not require a pre-stored image of a blank check to be used as a template. Instead it generates a ``pseudo template\\\\\\\'\\\\\\\' from a filled in input image which is then used as a reference to eliminate the background. The input image is subtracted from the generated reference image. The result is then separated into foreground pixels and background pixels based on a relative threshold that takes into account the magnitude of the pixels.