magnetic-ink character recognition

An example of one of the uses of magnetic ink in automatic character recognition. Because of the difficulties in forging magnetic-ink characters, and the speed with which they can be read by computer systems, MICR is used extensively in banking.

In computing, a technique that enables special characters printed in magnetic ink to be read and input rapidly to a computer. MICR is used extensively in banking because magnetic-ink characters can be machine-read with much greater accuracy than human reading or other optical character recognition (OCR) systems, and are therefore ideal for marking and identifying the account and sort code numbers on cheques.