1. A method of processing a code line in a gray scale image, comprising: generating a normally thresholded black white image from the gray scale image; generating a skeleton image from the gray scale image, wherein the skeleton image comprises an altered threshold setting; logically combining the normally thresholded black white image and the skeleton image to generate a composite image; generating a set of composite images by altering a threshold value associated with at least one of the normally thresholded black white image and the skeleton image; eliminating connected components in each composite image having fewer than N black pixels, where N is a predetermined integer; applying a set of magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) rules to identify and capture a code line from each composite image; and performing an OCR process on each code line to generate a set of code line data.