7. The computer program product of claim 6 , wherein the set of phase angle components comprises five harmonics including a fundamental and next four harmonics.
6. A computer program product stored on a non-transitory computer readable medium for implementing a phase angle based magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) system, comprising program code for: segmenting inputted MICR data into sets of temporal data for different inputted characters; generating a set of phase angle components from a Fourier transform of the temporal data for each segmented character, wherein the set of phase angle components comprises a plurality of harmonics; calculating a phase angle difference between adjacent harmonics of the plurality of harmonics to generate a set of phase angle differences; and comparing the set of phase angle differences with each of a set of reference waveforms to determine an identity of the inputted character.