Magnetic ink character recognition
Encyclopedia
Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR, is a character recognition technology used primarily by the banking industry to facilitate the processing of cheque
Cheque
A cheque is a document/instrument See the negotiable cow—itself a fictional story—for discussions of cheques written on unusual surfaces. that orders a payment of money from a bank account...

s and makes up the routing number and account number at the bottom of a check. The technology allows computers to read information (such as account numbers) off printed documents. Unlike barcode
Barcode
A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...

s or similar technologies, however, MICR codes can be easily read by humans.

MICR characters are printed in special typefaces with a magnetic ink or toner, usually containing iron oxide
Iron oxide
Iron oxides are chemical compounds composed of iron and oxygen. All together, there are sixteen known iron oxides and oxyhydroxides.Iron oxides and oxide-hydroxides are widespread in nature, play an important role in many geological and biological processes, and are widely utilized by humans, e.g.,...

. As a machine decodes the MICR text, it first magnetizes the characters in the plane of the paper. Then the characters are passed over a MICR read head, a device similar to the playback head of a tape recorder
Tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, tape deck, reel-to-reel tape deck, cassette deck or tape machine is an audio storage device that records and plays back sounds, including articulated voices, usually using magnetic tape, either wound on a reel or in a cassette, for storage...

. As each character passes over the head it produces a unique waveform
Waveform
Waveform means the shape and form of a signal such as a wave moving in a physical medium or an abstract representation.In many cases the medium in which the wave is being propagated does not permit a direct visual image of the form. In these cases, the term 'waveform' refers to the shape of a graph...

 that can be easily identified by the system.

The use of magnetic printing allows the characters to be read reliably even if they have been overprinted or obscured by other marks, such as cancellation stamps and signature. The error rate for the magnetic scanning of a typical check is smaller than with optical character recognition
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 systems. For well printed MICR documents, the "can't read" rate is usually less than 1% while the substitution rate (misread rate) is in the order of 1 per 100,000 characters.

It was invented by Kenneth R. Eldredge at the Stanford Research Institute
SRI International
SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

. MICR is standardized by ISO
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 1004:1995
.

Fonts

The major MICR font
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

s used around the world are E-13B and CMC-7. In the 1960s, the MICR fonts became a symbol of modernity or futurism, leading to the creation of lookalike "computer" typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

s that imitated the appearance of the MICR fonts, which unlike real MICR fonts, had a full character repertoire.

Almost all Indian, US, Canadian and UK cheques use the E-13B font. (The "13" in the font's name refers to the 0.013 inch grid used to design it.) Besides decimal digits it also contains the following symbols: ⑆ (transit: used to delimit a bank branch routing transit number
Routing transit number
A routing transit number is a nine digit bank code, used in the United States, which appears on the bottom of negotiable instruments such as checks identifying the financial institution on which it was drawn...

), ⑇ (amount: used to delimit a transaction amount), ⑈ (on-us: used to delimit a customer account number), and ⑉ (dash: used to delimit parts of numbers, e.g., routing numbers or account numbers).

Some countries, including France, use the CMC-7 font developed by Bull
Groupe Bull
-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...

.

Unicode

MICR characters were added to the Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

Standard in June, 1993 with the release of version 1.1.

The Unicode block that includes MICR characters is called Optical Character Recognition and covers U+2440–U+245F:

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK