Patent ID: 8644584

Claim:
An apparatus for processing currency bills, the apparatus comprising: an input receptacle configured to receive a stack of currency bills, each currency bill having a serial number and additional identifying character information; an image scanner configured to obtain image data that is reproducible as a visually readable image of one or more portions of at least one side of each currency bill, the image scanner configured to extract the serial number and one or more additional identifying characters from the image data for each currency bill, the image scanner further configured to extract denomination information for each currency bill; a controller configured to authenticate each currency bill based on the extracted serial number and the extracted one or more additional identifying characters for each respective currency bill; and an output device configured to automatically display a suspect note report for each currency bill determined to be non-authentic by the controller, the suspect note report for a non-authentic currency bill including fields populated with the serial number extracted from the image of the non-authentic currency bill, the additional identifying characters extracted from the image data for the non-authentic currency bill, and the extracted denomination information of the non-authentic currency bill.