Method and apparatus for discriminating and counting documents

DETAILED DESCRIPTION It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved currency scanning and counting machine which is relatively simple and compact, while at the same time providing a variety of advanced features which make the machine convenient and useful to the operator.
Another object of this invention is to provide such an improved currency scanning and counting machine that is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and maintain, and which also facilitates service and maintenance.
In this connection, a related object of the invention is to provide such a machine having a relatively small number of parts, and in which most of the parts are arranged in a manner to have a long operating life with little or no maintenance.
It is a further object of this invention to provide such a machine that is capable of operating at a faster throughput rate than any previous machine able to determine the denomination of the scanned bills.
It is another object of this invention to provide an improved method and apparatus of the above kind which is capable of efficiently discriminating among bills of several currency denominations at a high speed and with a high degree of accuracy.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent upon reading the following detailed description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.
In accordance with the one embodiment of the present invention, the foregoing objectives are realized by providing a currency evaluation device for receiving a stack of currency bills and rapidly evaluating all the bills in the stack.
This device includes an input receptacle for receiving a stack of bills to be evaluated and a single output receptacle for receiving the bills after they have been evaluated.
A transport mechanism transports the bills, one at a time, from the input receptacle to the output receptacle along a transport path.
The device further includes a discriminating unit that evaluates the bills.
The discriminating unit includes at least two detectors positioned along the transport path between the input receptacle and the output receptacle