MICR – Magnetic Ink Character Recognition
Magnetic ink character recognition, or MICR, is a character recognition technology used primarily by the banking industry to facilitate the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. The MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is located at the bottom of a cheque or other voucher and typically includes the document type indicator, bank code, bank account number, cheque number and the amount, plus some control indicator. The technology allows MICR readers to scan and read the information directly into a data collection device. Unlike barcodes or similar technologies, MICR characters can be easily read by humans. The MICR E-13B font has been adopted as the international standard in ISO 1004:1995, but the CMC-7 font is widely used in Europe.
MICR characters are printed on a document in either of the MICR fonts. The ink used in the printing is a magnetic ink or toner, usually containing iron oxide. The MICR text is passed before a MICR reader. The ink in the plane of the paper is first magnetized. Then the characters are passed over a MICR read head, a device similar to the playback head of a tape recorder. As each character passes over the head it produces a unique waveform that can be easily identified by the system.
The use of MICR allows the characters to be read reliably even if they have been overprinted or obscured by other marks, such as cancellation stamps and signature. The error rate for the magnetic scanning of a typical cheque is smaller than with optical character recognition systems. For well printed MICR documents, 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.
