BancTec unveils enhanced ICR

BancTec has unveiled a new recognition product that reads the written legal amount on a check. The Readfirst check and document recognition product analyzes character and field-level data from remittance, sales draft, lockbox, check, POD, and international GIRO documents. The recognition process can be adjusted to match specific end-user application requirements and document quality needs. When coupled into a multi-engine voting system, Readfirst can produce a 15–20% recognition improvement and a significant reduction in error rates over traditional single-engine processing. Together, legal amount recognition (LAR) and courtesy amount recognition (CAR) technology can achieve 70-80% recognition rates and .01-.05% error rates. "ReadFIRST's exceptional recognition and low error rates are superior not only to human keyers but also to any competitive system," according to Kevin Roper, BancTec's VP of worldwide solutions. When used with CAR to read numerical amounts and handwriting on checks, "Readfirst's voting results yield recognition rates unsurpassed in the market today." Readfirst is now available as either bitonal or grayscale; future versions (due late 1998) will be able to identify customer-written change of address notifications on remittance documents, and perform other mark sense detections.