Linear array based CCD technology has been successfully used in the development of an Automatic Currency Reader/Comparator (ACR/C) system. The ACR/C system is designed to provide a method for tracking US currency in the organized crime and drug trafficking environments where large amounts of cash are involved in illegal transactions and money laundering activities. United States currency notes can be uniquely identified by the combination of the denomination serial number and series year. The ACR/C system processes notes at five notes per second using a custom transport a stationary linear array and optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to make such identifications. In this way large sums of money can be " marked" (using the system to read and store their identifiers) and then circulated within various crime networks. The system can later be used to read and compare confiscated notes to the known sets of identifiers from the " marked" set to document a trail of criminal activities. With the ACR/C law enforcement agencies can efficiently identify currency without actually marking it. This provides an undetectable means for making each note individually traceable and facilitates record keeping for providing evidence in a court of law. In addition when multiple systems are used in conjunction with a central data base the system can be used to track currency geographically. 1.

Date Published: 12 August 1992
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 1656, High-Resolution Sensors and Hybrid Systems, (12 August 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.135912

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1656:
High-Resolution Sensors and Hybrid Systems
Morley M. Blouke; Winchyi Chang; Laurence J. Thorpe; Rajinder P. Khosla, Editor(s)