The disclosure relates generally to checks and other negotiable financial instruments and particularly to mitigating exposure to financial fraud. Specifically, the disclosure relates to systems and methods of authenticating checks issued by a first entity for the benefit of a third party.

Each of vehicles acquires its own position, and transmits an image of a nearby outside taken by an own camera and a piece of information of the own position. An information center communicatable wirelessly with the vehicles receives the images and the pieces of information of the vehicles' positions transmitted by the vehicles, and recognizes pieces of first character information appearing in the received images, respectively. Based on the received pieces of information of the vehicles' positions as well as at least either points of interest or areas stored as collection target information, the information center determines at least either points of interest or areas for the recognized pieces of first character information, respectively, and stores association information where the pieces of first character information are associated with the determined at least either points of interest or areas.

A method of processing a mixed bunch of banknotes and checks in a recycling self-service terminal is described. The method comprises: receiving a bunch of documents; recognizing each document from the received bunch; for each banknote recognized from the received bunch, validating the authenticity of that banknote; for each check recognized from the received bunch, extracting financial information from that check; and notifying a customer of the total value of the deposited bunch. A document validator, and a self-service terminal including the document validator, are also described.

The optical character recognition method applies a first OCR engine to provide an identification of characters of at least a first type of characters and zones of at least a second type of characters in the character string image. A second OCR engine is applied on the zones of the at least second type of characters to provide an identification of characters of a second type of characters. The characters identified by the first OCR engine and by the second OCR engine are in a further step combined to obtain the identification of the characters of the character string image.

The present invention relates to a method and a module for a multimodal text input in a mobile device (1) via a keyboard or in a camera mode by holding the camera of the mobile device (1) over a written text, such that an image is taken of the written text and the written text is recognized, wherein the input text is output to an application requesting the input text, the method comprising the following steps: a) activating a keyboard mode; b) providing an A-Z-keyboard in a first field (4) for text input; c) activating the camera mode; d) capturing the image of the written text and displaying the captured image with the written text in a second field (5) of a display (2) of the mobile device (1); e) converting the captured image to character text by optical character recognition (OCR) and displaying the recognized character text on the display (2); outputting a selected character as the input text to the application upon a selection of the character on the A-Z-keyboard, or outputting a selected part of the recognized character text as the input text to the application upon a selection of the part of the recognized character text; wherein the respective selection takes place by a single keypress or control command, or by a single gesture.

An approach is provided for managing processing rules used to process electronic data in computer networks. An application provides the capability for users to define and manage classifications for electronic data. The application also provides the capability for users to define and manage processing rules for each classification. This may include specifying, for each processing rule, a classification to which the processing rule corresponds, one or more conditions under which the processing rule is to be applied and optionally, not applied, a priority for the processing rule, and one or more actions to be performed. The priority may be used to determine which rule is to be applied when more than one rule corresponds to a classification. The application supports the definition and management of classifications and rules on a logical group-by-logical group basis.

The present invention includes an apparatus and method that facilitates the manual sorting of slides into slide folders. The apparatus includes a horizontal display surface and a controller configured to receive slides and folders into which the slides are to be placed (or sorted). The controller operates components of the apparatus to selectively illuminate the display surface to guide a user in placing folders at multiple folder locations and in sorting the slides into the folders. In one aspect of the invention, the apparatus is configured to allow multiple folders to be stacked at a folder location during the slide sorting process. In these aspects, the apparatus is configured to determine number of folders stacked at each folder location.

A resource allocation can be utilized to control resources to determine trustworthy item scores for a respondent's response to an assessment item. Embodiments may utilize one or more resources to extract the student response to an item, one or more resources to establish an item score for that item based on the extracted response, and one or more resources to evaluate the extracted or score and further utilize such resources until a trustworthy item score is established. Confidence indicators may be used for both digital representations of student responses and the scores derived from such digital representations of student responses.

A mark irradiation unit (130) irradiates an object with a mark. An image capture unit (140) captures an image of the object, and generates image data. Then, an image capture area data generation unit recognizes a position of the mark in the object, and cuts out image capture area data which is apart of the image data on the basis of the mark. For this reason, the mark irradiation unit (130) irradiates the object with the mark, and thus even when a positioning symbol is not printed on the object to be stored as the image data, only a necessary portion in the image data is cut out.

Certain text editing techniques are provided to enable the user to select a few characters or words from an original collection of text by a limited number of user inputs, such as by touching or swiping a character or word to be edited. Options for probable edits of the original text can be automatically presented to the user in a manner that also only requires a minimal number of user inputs. Such techniques may facilitate text editing that is easier and more convenient for users of portable electronic devices. These techniques may be particularly advantageous for enabling editing of text acquired from an optical character recognition (OCR) process on any computing device. Other text editing shortcuts and similar approaches are also described.