Verifying Document Authenticity

Magneto-optical technology can be used to quickly visualize magnetic inks on documents and MIRC-encoded checks.

The term magnetic ink refers to ink mixed with iron oxide particles. These particles can be magnetized by an external magnetic field and thus analyzed and read out magneto-optically. It combines the appearance of commercial ink with the ability to be read and processed electronically, as well as anti-counterfeiting features.

In the U.S., magnetic ink is used as a security feature in check transactions. Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) encoding and ISO 1004:1995 standardized fonts make the checks machine-readable and counterfeit-proof.

Using magneto-optical systems, such as our cmos-magview, to verify the encoding on these checks results in a "can't read" rate of less than 1%..

This means that in one out of every 100,000 cases something is read incorrectly. This makes the "false read rate" significantly lower than with optical readers. The optical processing possibilities provided by the results of the magneto-optical analysis eliminates the need for complex computer analysis of the magnetic field strengths (comparison of measured "actual strengths" with predefined "target strengths" for each individual character). The magneto-optical images of MICR-compliant fonts can be compared to the appearance of standard inks for verification.