Automatic processing of handwritten bank cheque images: a survey

Bank cheques (checks) are still widely used all over the world for financial transactions. Huge volumes of handwritten bank cheques are processed manually every day in developing countries. In such a manual verification, user written information including date, signature, legal and courtesy amounts present on each cheque has to be visually verified. As many countries use cheque truncation systems (CTS) nowadays, much time, effort and money can be saved if this entire process of recognition, verification and data entry is done automatically using images of cheques. An attempt is made in this paper to present the state of the art in automatic processing of handwritten cheque images. It discusses the important results reported so far in preprocessing, extraction, recognition and verification of handwritten fields on bank cheques and highlights the positive directions of research till date. The paper has a comprehensive bibliography of many references as a support for researchers working in the field of automatic bank cheque processing. The paper also contains some information about the products available in the market for automatic cheque processing. To the best of our knowledge, there is no survey in the area of automatic cheque processing, and there is a need of such a survey to know the state of the art.