Document Scanning And Document Management. How Information Is Extracted From The Page.

The software that drives your document scanning or document management application can be highly complex

. This article answers some of the more commonly asked questions.

First lets deal with some basic jargon and what it stands for and what it was designed for:

OCR or "Optical Character Recognition" is the term used for recognising the text on a scanned page.

ICR or "Image Character Recognition" is the term used for recognising handwriting on a scanned page.

Once a page has been scanned, the scan is an image or "photograph" of the page and cannot be edited. This is great news for compliance purposes but many people looking to scan pages want to speed up the business process and extract the information on the page.

Here are some examples of documents where the information on the page may need to be read:

* * Delivery or Despatch notes

* * Bank statements

* * Invoices

* * Questionnaires & Surveys

* * Contracts

"With the right software, configured correctly, information can be processed quickly and exported into any application using CSV, XML or DLL"

Free Form Recognition

Up until recently, recognition worked by "drawing" around an area of the screen and telling the software application to read this area every time a page is scanned. This is known as Zonal OCR and it a a very efficient and highly effective way of extracting the information you need.

This works well for many documents but requires a "template" to be created for each document. As an example, if you are scanning delivery notes for your 10 clients, each client's delivery note will look different and as a result will need a separate set of instructions.

Freeform recognition works differently because the whole page is read and then information on the page is extracted based on a set of instructions. This means we can scan all of our suppliers invoices and then set some rules to look for the invoice number on the page - ie find the label "invoice number, our ref, client ref or invoice no." and then to the right, or below find a value.

With freeform, a flexible template can be created to interrogate information and then use business rules to check the likely possibility that the information we have found is correct. As an example, if we are looking for an invoice total, we can look for other values and then add them up to verify that the total is indeed the total value of the invoice.

A freeform template may require some programming behind the scenes, but once tested will be extremely powerful and allow processing of tens of thousands of documents on a daily basis with direct export in the exact format you need for your business applications.

by: geoff shilton

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