Methodology to Authorize Bank Cheque Automatically

Abstract

This study shows the automation of a simple cheque captured by a camera or a scanner. The bank cheque is a declining bank instrument. The cheque is still one of the payment methods in Sri Lanka. It is mostly used by the corporate community. While I am studying the research, I have contacted several people to inquire about cheques and its realization process. Unfortunately, most of them are not sentient of the check realization process or details printed on the cheque. In-order to possess cheque issuing facility, a person should have a cheque account where the bank is offering a cheque book. There are several areas in a cheque for its realization process. Those areas are date, pay, bearer, amounts in words and amounts in figures, signature, and magnetic ink area. Each of these areas plays a salient role in cheque realization process. In the date area, cheque issued date is mentioned. Generally a cheque is valid for 6 months of period. Therefore if a cheque issued date is more than 6 months, it is considered as an expired cheque. Amounts in words and amounts in figures should match with each other, otherwise it is an invalid cheque. Also, the issuer signature should be there on the cheque signature area. The signature should validate with the signature stored in the bank’s database. If there is a miss-match, the cheque is consider as an invalid cheque. Bank systems can identify unique chque number, branch of the cheque account, cheque account number by using magnetic ink are details. From the pay area, bank officer can identify the payee details (Cash cheque). Currently, above-mentioned processes have been done manually by bank officers [23]. According to the cheque clearance type, it can change the time taken to clear the cheque. There are three cheque clearance types. Inward cheques, outward cheques and transfers. Inward cheques are cheques a bank received from a 3rd party cheque clearance organization. Transfers are a bank received its cheques by customers. Outward cheques are cheques that a bank received other bank cheques from its customers. Inward cheques and transfers are done by the bank while transferring outward cheques to a 3rd party clearance organization. In this study, when identifying the areas, first the cheque area will be identified and extracted from the given input image; then, the system will remove noise and resize the image for a defined size and crop key areas to process the optical character recognition and comparison. For noise removal, it is using Gaussian filter while the Tesseract Optical Character Recognition Engine is used to read English characters in the cheque. Also, it is using Scale Invariant Feature Transform algorithm to identify signature on the cheque. By applying optical character recognition and comparison techniques, the realization process is automated. The accuracy of the system for printed character identification is 90%, handwritten character identification is 60%. Signature identification accuracy by using image comparison techniques is 70%.