Patent ID: 7711642

Claim:
A payment form discrimination method for discriminating a payment form which states at least a payee account number and a payment amount, comprising: acquiring image data of the form by optically reading the form; searching by a computer for the payee account number in the image data at an unknown position in accordance with an account number searching rule; determining by the computer a type of the form based on the payee account number from a document information table that stores account numbers correlated with types of the form; and recovering by the computer other data from locations according to the determined type of the form, wherein said account number searching rule comprises: searching for hyphens in the image data; determining at least one location of a specified hyphen arrangement formed by at least one group among the hyphens detected by said search; character-recognizing the image data in areas surrounding the at least one location of the specified hyphen arrangement; and determining an account number based on the character recognition and matching the account number with account numbers registered in said document information table, the matched account number being the payee account number.