Systems and methods for mobile automated clearing house enrollment

#The embodiments described herein generally relate to automated document processing and more particularly, to systems and methods for mobile capture and processing of documents for enrollment in an automated clearing house (ACH) transaction.

#An Automated Clearing House (ACH) transaction is a type of electronic funds transfer (EFT) that occurs between two separate entities, often known as a receiver and an originator. The receiver is a party which grants authorization to the originator for the transfer of funds to or from the receiver's bank account. The originator may be a business or service provider to which the receiver owes money, such as a utility company, loan provider, etc. For example, a customer may want to have the amount of their monthly phone bill debited directly from their checking account and transferred to the phone company. By setting up an ACH transaction, the customer, or receiver, does not have to remember to mail out a check to the phone company every month. The phone company, or originator, also benefits in that it does not need to physically process a check that arrives in the mail and can instead electronically debit an amount from the customer's checking account on the same day of the month.

#ACH transactions also work in the seemingly opposite situation, such as when a company wants to make a recurring payment to an individual's checking account; for example, an employer that wishes to pay an employee twice a month. The employee is still considered the receiver, while the employer is still termed the originator. Again, the benefit to the employee is that they do not have to wait to receive a physical check and then go to a bank to deposit the money, as the money is electronically deposited into their bank account on a particular date. The employer does not have to mail out physical checks and wait for them to be deposited.

#The various embodiments provided herein are described in detail with reference to the following figures. The drawings are provided for purposes of illustration only and merely depict typical or example embodiments. These drawings are provided to facilitate the reader's understanding of the invention and shall not be considered limiting of the breadth, scope, or applicability of the embodiments. It should be noted that for clarity and ease of illustration these drawings are not necessarily made to scale.

#FIG. 1 is an image of a remittance coupon 100 illustrating an example remittance coupon that might be imaged with the systems and methods described herein.

#FIG. 2 is a geometrically corrected image created using image processing techniques disclosed herein using the mobile image of the remittance coupon 100 illustrated in FIG. 1.

#The embodiments described herein are directed towards automated document processing and systems and methods for document image processing using mobile devices. System and methods are provided for processing a remittance coupon captured using a mobile device. Generally, in some embodiments an original color image of a document is captured using a mobile device and then converted the color image to a bi-tonal image. More specifically, in some embodiments, a color image of a document taken by a mobile device is received and converted into a bi-tonal image of the document that is substantially equivalent in its resolution, size, and quality to document images produced by “standard” scanners.

#The term “standard scanners” as used herein, but is not limited to, transport scanners, flat-bed scanners, and specialized check-scanners. Some manufacturers of transport scanners include UNISYS®, BancTec®, IBM®, and Canon®. With respect to specialized check-scanners, some models include the TellerScan® TS200 and the Panini® My Vision X. Generally, standard scanners have the ability to scan and produce high quality images, support resolutions from 200 dots per inch to 300 dots per inch (DPI), produce gray-scale and bi-tonal images, and crop an image of a check from a larger full-page size image. Standard scanners for other types of documents may have similar capabilities with even higher resolutions and higher color-depth.

#The term “color images” as used herein, but is not limited to, images having a color depth of 24 bits per a pixel (24 bit/pixel), thereby providing each pixel with one of 16 million possible colors. Each color image is represented by pixels and the dimensions W (width in pixels) and H (height in pixels). An intensity function I maps each pixel in the [W×H] area to its RGB-value. The RGB-value is a triple (R,G,B) that determines the color the pixel represents. Within the triple, each of the R (Red), G (Green) and B (Blue) values are integers between 0 and 255 that determine each respective color's intensity for the pixel.