Amount translation and error localization in check processing using syntax-directed translation

Abstract

Introduces a method for the comparison of legal and courtesy amount recognized by OCR programs on bank checks. Based on the method of syntax-directed translation (SDT), the result of legal amount recognition is translated into a digit string that can be directly compared with the result of courtesy amount recognition. SDT turns out to be a systematic, simple and flexible technique for this step. It is especially useful for languages where the translation cannot be done in a straightforward way and many different word representations correspond to the same digit amount. The information provided by SDT in our system is used to infer the relation between each digit and the corresponding part of the word amount. Thus if an inconsistency between the recognized word and digit amount occurs, the mismatching parts within each amount can be localized. The method has been implemented and tested on real postal checks. It is part of a check reading system that is currently under development.