Patent ID: 8644583

Claim:
A method of processing currency bills in a document processing system, the method comprising: receiving currency bills in an input receptacle of the document processing system, each of the currency bills including a denomination, a serial number, and a set of secondary identifiers; transporting the currency bills from the input receptacle in a serial fashion, past an image scanner, to one or more output receptacles; imaging each of the currency bills using the image scanner to produce image data from which a visually readable image of each currency bill can be reproduced; determining that one of the currency bills is a suspect bill; attempting to extract, from the image data associated with the suspect bill, the serial number of the suspect bill, the serial number of the suspect bill having an integer number, X, of characters; failing to extract all of the X characters of the serial number of the suspect bill; and in response to determining that a currency bill is a suspect bill and in response to failing to extract all of the X characters of the serial number of the suspect bill, populating a serial number field in a suspect report with a serial number snippet image.