OCR and Card Reader Toolkit: Summary of Features
The OCR Toolkit contains Windows 32-bit libraries (Windows 95 / 98 / NT /2000) and an API which allows software developers to use the highly accurate OCR engine to read document images. The API is extremely easy to implement, and a number of sample Visual Basic and C programs are included.
OCR engine capabilities and features:
- Easy implementation - just 3 function calls to OCR-enable your application
- Fast and highly accurate omni-font technology
- Reads 6 to 32 point size print
- Reads fax documents
- Automatic document orientation detection (detects upside down images)
- Automatic image de-skew to correct slanted images (up to 14 degrees)
- Automatic graphics detection enables the OCR engine to automatically avoid reading graphics regions.
- OCR zone specification allows you to precisely specify the co-ordinates of each zone to read. You can also specify the contents of each zone (uppercase, lowercase, numeric etc.)
- OCR output specifies the location and size of every recognized character.
- Poor confidence marker for any character not recognized.
- International language capabilities currently supports English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Irish.
Additional capabilities included with toolkit:
- Read and store image files in PCX, TIFF and BMP formats.
- Rotate images 90, 180 and 270 degrees.
- Dictionary and spell checking utilities for post-recognition correction.
Libraries included with the OCR toolkit.
- Image Utility Library
- This library enables the application to filter or process the image prior to calling the OCR function to read the image. The utilities include image rotation, and image row doubling (to process fax images). The library also includes a function to de-skew binary images that are skewed by as much as 14 degrees.
- Image I/O Library
- This library contains utilities for reading and writing image files. Supported image formats are TIFF, PCX. and BMP.
- Recognition Library
- This library contains 3 API functions ( Initialization, OCR_Page and De-initialization) which performs OCR on a given image in memory.
- Dictionary Library
- This library enables an application to create dictionary files and to search for valid words in a dictionary. This can be used to validate OCR results against a lexicon of stored words. The toolkit includes a 80,000 word English dictionary.
This toolkit contains the OCR Toolkit and also the Business Card Reader Library which allows developers to use the card reading technology. The library contains simple API calls which enables an application to scan and read business card images and automatically extract field information from the card.
- Card Reader Library capabilities and features:
- Automatically OCR and read business cards using a single function call
- Automatically extract field information from card images into the following fields - name, title, company, address, city, state, postal/zip, country, phone, fax, email and web
- International - capable of extracting card information from business cards originating from US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan and other countries
- Drivers and scanner API to interface to all EDT card scanners.
This toolkit contains the Drivers and scanner API to interface to all EDT card scanners.