NORTHBROOK, IL, August 30, 2016 – Digital Check has been issued two U.S. patents for image-enhancement software related to adjusting different areas of a check image independently from one another. Patents No. 20150302244 and 20150302245 cover technology currently in use within the Clear by Digital Check® suite of software products. The patents apply to the company’s unique zoned thresholding technology, which intelligently applies variable contrast settings to checks and other payment instruments, improving the legibility of the final images that are used for processing and clearing.
The thresholding technology represents the result of several years of continuous work on improved image quality, which solves an increasing problem in the banking industry. Since checks and money orders are settled between banks electronically, documents with illegible account numbers, dollar amounts, and other key information can be rejected in the clearing process, causing long delays and adding significant expense. Digital Check’s software clears up the critical information so that images go through the settlement process correctly and image quality-related errors are greatly reduced.
“When banks switched from paper to image-based settlement, the benefits were immediate – but a side effect was that many things, from innocuous background designs to deliberate security printing, can make checks and money orders difficult for machines to read,” says Rian Maloney, Digital Check’s Vice President of Software Applications. “We are constantly exploring new ways for our equipment to ‘see through’ these obstacles. With Clear, we’ve succeeded in solving some of the worst of these problem documents that have been causing the industry difficulty for years.”
Clear by Digital Check® is a system intended primarily for banks that use the software behind the scenes to clean up images of checks that are either scanned at the counter in branches or deposited through other channels such as ATMs or remote deposit capture. The standard version of Clear allows a human operator to digitally enhance areas of a check using a click-and-drag interface, while the more recent Clear Inline® recognizes problem documents in real time and performs the cleanup automatically.
Clear joins other tools, such as the Vault by Digital Check® vault processing software and the Advisor by Digital Check® geolocation service, in Digital Check’s growing line of banking software for document processing and image handling. For more information about Digital Check products and services, please visit www.digitalcheck.com or call (847) 446-2285.
About Digital Check
Digital Check provides superior check scanners and document capture products for teller capture, branch automation, remote deposit capture, and remote lockbox applications. Digital Check’s award-winning CheXpress®, TellerScan®, BranchXpress®, and SB Series electronic scanners are among the most cost-effective and reliable in the industry, and provide high-quality images with precise MICR accuracy. Digital Check also provides software solutions for image quality, vault processing, and scanner geolocation and monitoring.
