Numeral amount recognition on multi-bank cheques

We present in this paper an automatic recognition module for the handwritten numerical amounts on multi-bank French cheques. This module is integrated in LIRECheques system, a system developed by MATRA CAP Systemes, which uses it in collaboration with the automatic recognition of the literal amounts. Two particular aspects of the numerical amount recognition system are detailed: the numeral recognition stage itself and the syntactic analysis. The numeral recognition module filters, by means of a structural supervisor, the digit results derived from the parallel combination of, on one hand a concavity based recognition and on the other hand a structural/statistical feature based recognition. The syntactic analysis module combines a pure syntactic analysis with contextual information (so called syntactic/contextual analysis) to take into account the segmentation behaviour and the presence of literal entities.