News

De La Rue takes OCR to new level

May 16, 2006

HAMPSHIRE, England - De La Rue PLC announced in a news release the launch of a new generation of banknote sorters that are optical character recognition, OCR, enabled.

"These banknote sorters have a throughput of up to 120,000 banknotes an hour, and some of the banknotes will be worn or dirty through use, which makes character recognition more difficult," said Ed Brindley, De La Rue's product manager for the Cash Processing Solutions division. "But we have worked with our colleagues in the currency division on areas such as the creation of covert high-level features for central-bank use."

Serial numbers have helped to identify stolen or counterfeit currency. They also can be used by central banks to establish the issue of banknotes for statistical purposes.

While serial numbers can be checked manually, it is a time-consuming process. Mechanical sorters offer a solution, but they struggle to work in real time.