Magnetic ink character recognition

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Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR, a character recognition technology adopted mainly by the banking industry to facilitate the processing of checks. The process was demonstrated to the American Bankers Association in July 1956, and it was almost universally employed in the U.S. by 1963^[1]

The major MICR fonts used around the world are E-13B and CMC-7. Almost all US, Canadian, and UK cheques 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.

Image:MICR.png

An example of the E-13B MICR font. Shown are 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.

Image:Cmc7.png

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.

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 1963, the MICR fonts became a symbol of modernity, 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.

[edit] See also

Optical character recognition

[edit] External links

What Is MICR?
GNU General Public Licensed MICR font
MICR Repository
Java Glossary (defines the routing number and account number)
MICR
MICR Overview
Finance::MICR::LineParser module for Perl

v • d • e Magnetic storage media
Wire (1898) • Tape (1928) • Drum (1932) • Ferrite core (1949) • Hard disk (1956) • Stripe card (1956) • MICR (1956) • Thin film (1962) • CRAM (1962) • Twistor (~1968) • Floppy disk (1969) • Bubble (~1970) • MRAM