Abstract: An optical character recognition system and method therefor is disclosed for reading a machine encoded character font, such as the E13B magnetic ink character (MICR) font. The digitized data of an optical scan band of the document to be read is read by an optical scanner and stored in memory. A two pass operation of the digitized data is then performed by the respective algorithms of the system to locate and recognize the characters read.

Abstract: A magnetic character reader system for reading and identifying magnetized characters printed on a document such as a check, in which analog waveforms derived from scanning the characters are analyzed by rectifying and integrating the waveform to generate a value representing the gain of a programmable gain amplifier for use in amplifying the waveform to compensate for variations in ink intensity. Means are provided for generating a value representing the center of gravity of the area under each peak of the amplified waveform for use in retiming the peak sampling windows for compensating for variations in the speed of the document past the magnetic read head. Digital values representing the area under each peak curve in the waveform are compared with corresponding values of a plurality of reference characters to identify the unknown character.