Character and pattern recognition machine and method

Claim 1

Banking apparatus for high speed processing bank checks, drafts and like documents having courtesy amount fields thereon with numeric characters therein, comprising: means for conveying said documents along a path, means for locating and scanning said courtesy amount field to produce an optical image thereof, digitizing means for converting said optical image of the numeric character in said courtesy amount field to an electronic binary black/white pixel image thereof, a plurality of parallel connected artificial fovea for emulating the behavior of a human fovea, each artificial fovea including means for temporary storage of said pixel image, means for measuring sections of said pixel images to produce image measurements, means for scoring said image measurements, and recognition scoring means having recognition equations stored therein, said recognition scoring means being connected to said plurality of artificial fovea to score the image measurements from each said artificial fovea and identify the numeric character from the respective artificial fovea.