Laurel Bank Machines Company, Ltd.

Moriatsu Kawakami

Kiyoshi Fujii

Shinya Uchida

Kazuya Kohzu

A paper money discriminator for identifying the type of a bank note by detecting colors thereof from reflected or transmitted light obtained by irradiating the bank note. The paper money discriminator is provided with optical fiber bundles disposed so as to respectively face a light source and color detecting sensors, and color filters disposed in positions adjacent to the color detecting sensors. The top ends of the optical fiber bundles face an inspection point on the bank note. The paper money discriminator is provided with identifying systems each of which is composed of a detecting unit, a calculating unit and a money type identifying unit and is adapted for detecting reflected or transmitted light in the form of two separated color components issuing from a type of bank note, obtaining the ratio of these components, and comparing a signal representing a calculated pattern with the reference pattern signals, thereby identifying the money type. The discriminator also has a money type determining unit which determines the type of bank note when all of the money types respectively identified by the identifying systems coincide with each other. In this discriminator, at least one of the detecting units in the identifying systems is positioned such as to be capable of detecting a watermark portion of the bank note.

Paper money discriminator

A bill discriminating device which is able to carry out a bill discriminating operation at high speed and precision based on a reduced amount of processing data for bill-type discrimination by extracting and reading only characteristic regions of the bill. According to the present invention, bill discrimination can be carried out by: reading the picture image data output from an image sensor; roughly discriminating the type of bill from the length of the picture image data (corresponding to the width of the bill); reading position data and reference patterns of the characteristic regions corresponding to the type of bill; extracting picture image data (a characteristic pattern) corresponding to the characteristic regions from the position data; and, finally discriminating the type of bill by comparing the characteristic patterns with the reference patterns.

Bill discriminating device

A device for adjusting optical sensors in which light from a light emitting element is detected by a light receiving element to determine whether the output level of said light receiving element exceeds a certain threshold. The present device is used for adjusting the optical sensors used, for example, in an automatic cash receiving and dispensing machine and the like and enables accurate operation the bill and/or coin handling machines to continue to operate reliably despite changes with the time of the optical sensors and the deposit of dust on the sensors, by constantly comparing the light reception level with a predetermined threshold and utilizing the optimum threshold.

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Zushi, Japan

Moriatsu Kawakami