Magnetic ink character recognition

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Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR, is a character recognition technology adopted mainly by the banking industry to facilitate the processing of cheques. The process was demonstrated to the American Bankers Association in July 1956, and was almost universally employed in the U.S. by 1963.^[1]. On September 12, 1961, Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) was awarded U.S. Patent Number 3,000,000 for invention of MICR; the patent was assigned to General Electric^[2]. MICR is standardized by ISO 1004^{[citation needed]}.

The major MICR fonts used around the world are E-13B and CMC-7. The E-13B font was chosen by George Jacobi, who was working for General Electric at the time.^{[citation needed]} Almost all Indian, US, Canadian and UK checks now include MICR characters at the bottom of the paper in the E-13B font. Some countries, including France, use the CMC-7 font developed by Bull.

The 14 characters of the E-13B font. The control characters bracketing each numeral block are (from left to right) transit, on-us, amount, and dash.

An example of the CMC-7 MICR font. Shown are the 15 characters of the CMC-7 font. The control characters after the numerals are (from left to right) internal, terminator, amount, routing, and an unused character.

In addition to their unique fonts, MICR characters are printed with a magnetic ink or toner, usually containing iron oxide. Magnetic printing is used so that the characters can be reliably read into a system, even when they have been overprinted with other marks such as cancellation stamps. The characters are first magnetized in the plane of the paper with a North pole on the right of each MICR character. Then they are usually read with a MICR read head which is a device similar in nature to the playback head in an audio tape recorder, and the letterforms' bulbous shapes ensure that each letter produces a unique waveform for the character recognition system to provide a reliable character result. Examples of MICR waveforms have been developed and can be displayed using spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel or compatible.^[3]

The error rate for the magnetic scanning of the numbers at the bottom of a typical check is smaller than with optical character recognition systems. For well printed MICR, 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.

In 1960s, the MICR fonts became a symbol of modernity or futurism, leading to the creation of lookalike "computer" typefaces that imitated the appearance of the MICR fonts, but, unlike real MICR fonts, had a full character repertoire. These checks were typically printed on impact printers.

The concept of utilizing desktop printers for check printing revolutionized the check printing business and companies began to manufacture MICR toner for desktop laser printers.

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[edit] External links

• What Is MICR?
• MICR E-13B Character set
• History of MICR and the Check
• GNU General Public Licensed MICR font
• MICR Repository
• Java Glossary (defines the routing number and account number)
• MICR
• Finance::MICR::LineParser module for Perl
• U.S. Patent #3,000,000
• X9 Standards overview document of all MICR-related standards and how they are organized