A high speed colour cheque image capture and processing system

This paper describes a potential implementation of a high speed colour cheque image processing system. The description starts with the overall architecture of a colour image capture system. The system's image processing capabilities include gray balancing, colour space conversion, colour image binarization to segment the text from the background and could include in the future cheque amount recognition from the binary image. An original algorithm based on colour clustering is introduced to improve the image binarization process. To test various components of the system, a prototype colour image capture system was built. Initial results on image binarization are shown.