Magnetic ink character recognition

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Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR (normally pronounced my-ker), 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 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.

The major MICR fonts used around the world are E-13B and CMC-7. Almost all 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.

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.

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 1960s, 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

• Barcode
• Optical character recognition

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Mandell, Lewis. "Diffusion of EFTS among National Banks: Note", Journal of Money, Credit and Banking Vol. 9, No. 2. (May, 1977)
2. ^ U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, September 12, 1961

[edit] External links

• What Is MICR?
• History of MICR and the Check
• Check processing fonts around the world
• 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
• U.S. Patent #3,000,000