[Mageia-discuss] Reading payment forms with a scanner

Fri Feb 15 07:52:19 CET 2013

A positive remark about swiss banks! But errorproofness for swiss 
+payment slips is also quite relative: (a) the long reference digit 
+chains only have a very simple longitudinal 1-digit checksum that 
+catches many, but not all errors that happen if you key them in manually 
+and (b) all the OCR pograms that I have tested are far from perfect. And 
+yes, for some time I tried to use one of these portable devices - they 
+accumulate limited quality of scanning with limited quality of OCR 
+conversion: between handling and checking I spent more time than I need 
+for manual input and verification.
+
+My recent error scenario illustrates this: my incorrectly keyed in digit 
+string happened to not trigger a checksum error, hence was accepted by 
+the ebanking system of my bank, but was then rejected by the destination 
+bank because the string did not make sense to them.
+
+In the meantime, I have hacked a kind of tool which both shortens the 
+time I need to prepare my payments and diminuishes errorproneness,
+- it selects the area to read and adjusts parameters for xsane,
+- increases the output of xsane by a factor of 1.5 (amazing how that 
+reduces the errors of OCR conversion),
+- submits the result to tesseract,
+- does some string processing,
+- displays the corrected and the original strings (see attachment - bad 
+quality to limit the size of this email), ready for copy paste.
+
+Looks very promising (and can be improved, I only spent half an 
+afternoon) - needs now to be assessed by really using it in 
+"production". Talking about generalisation - I see your arguments - does 
+only make sense once that provides positive results.
+
+Generalisation: maybe the concepts I put to work allow to create similar 
+tools / adjust the one I have made. I live part of my time in Austria - 
+Austrian slips should not be too difficult to handle along such lines. 
+And, maybe the mandatory introduction of IBAN input will create an 
+incentive to banks to improve the readability of their slips.
+
+Juergen
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