[tgflynn]

I don't know much about check processing but I used to work for the company that built the system the USPS uses to read addresses on envelopes (both machine printed and hand-written). Many years of research and development went into that system financed either directly by USPS funding to academia or through performance improvement contracts with industry. Over 10-20 years the systems went from being able to read only a fraction of the mail to the point where today they have practically replaced manual address keying.

There is probably a similar story behind check reading systems.

My impression is that although there are a number of commercially available OCR applications their performance is far from that of specialized proprietary systems such as those used by the USPS and banks.