OCR for handwritten checks

The client is the accounts-receivable product from our cash-application case. A share of its customers' payments still arrived as paper checks, scanned before they reached the system.

The printed fields on a check are the easy part. The amount is often handwritten, sometimes in cursive, and the layout changes from one region and bank to the next. Off-the-shelf OCR read the print and gave up on the hand.

We split the problem in two. Printed fields went through OCR, while handwritten amounts, cursive included, went to a recognition step of their own, with layout handling that told each step where to look on a given region's checks.

By the end, more than 10,000 checks had been recognized, handwriting included. Recognized checks feed the payment-matching flow, where half of the funds are allocated automatically.