User manual ABBYY SOFTWARE FORMREADER-AUTOMATED FORMS PROCESSING

[. . . ] AUTOMATED FORMS PROCESSING Table of Contents Introduction . . 22 Operator stress as an important quality factor . . 22 Organizing Automated Forms Processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Using ABBYY Technologies to Solve Untypical Tasks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . ] Forms must be scanned at 200 300 dpi and all scanners support this resolution. Higher resolutions will inevitably slow down the entire process Duplex scanning. Many projects require scanners that can run in both duplex and simplex modes and scan either in black and white or in colour. The latter is required when removing colour seals from images or when saving colour photos from questionnaires. This device allows you to load batches of 25, 50, or 100 docu ments into the scanner. This is a must have, otherwise the operator will spend 90% of his time feeding paper documents into the scanner. Throughput. Very often the overall speed of processing depends on the speed of scanning. In terms of throughput, scanners can be divided into the following three groups: office low throughput scanners, office medium throughput scanners, and production scanners with very high throughput. Low end office scanners have a throughput of up to 500 pages per day while productions scanners may scan more than 20, 000 pages per day. If the scanner accidentally takes in two form pages at a time, this may result in some of the pages not processed at all. To prevent this from happening, many scanners have a spe cial control mechanism which weighs paper sheets, measures their thickness or measures the light that may penetrate them. But these methods do not work if the forms are not homoge neous (i. e. printed on different kinds of paper, have different colours and paper thickness, etc. ). The solution is to use ultra sonic sensors which make sure that the signal has been reflected only from one surface, i. e. Some scanners may have a number of additional features which may also come in useful An endorser or a built in printer that prints on scanned documents an index that is then used to identify them; A hardware image enhancement module; A hardware image compression module; Colour lamps that can remove certain backgrounds (so called drop out colours red, blue or green); Caching images in the scanner's onboard memory, which makes for faster scanning. Automated forms processing: step by step Personnel training Working with ABBYY FormReader requires minimum special knowledge and training. The data capture system is usually run by operators responsible for entering data from forms and an administrator who sets up and monitors the system. Depending on how data capture is organized, the operator's job can be of two kinds all operations are performed on one computer, the opera tor loads forms into the scanner, and oversees the scan ning, recognition, and verification processes; in the case of ABBYY FormReader Enterprise Edition, dif ferent operators are responsible for specific processes scanning, document assembly, verification, and export. The program is set up by an administrator. In the case of ABBYY FormReader Enterprise Edition, the administrator deploys the system, allocates processing roles to operators, cre ates templates and descriptions of multi page documents. The operator also oversees the flow of information within the sys tem It takes from several hours to 2 3 days to train the operators and the administrator*. All the practical knowledge required to operate FormReader can be acquired within this time period thanks to a carefully thought out training course * The administrator's training course includes the following topics : 1) production capture; 2) designing new forms; 3) creating form templates; 4) installing ABBYY products (including network installations); 5) setting up scanning, recognition and verification options; 6) allocating processing roles to operators; 7) creating validation rules and document assembly rules; 8) monitoring the operation of the program and creating reports. Processing cycles For a better understanding of how ABBYY FormReader works, let us take a closer look at the main processing cycles. A batch is a collection of similar documents which must be processed and saved both as images and as text data captured from the fields. [. . . ] Documents stored in archives are usually not machine readable: The location of fields is not fixed, There are no reference points (e. g. black squares or crosses), Fields may include words in cursive writing, Fields may be obstructed by stamps or inscriptions. This means that such documents cannot be processed using the conventional template approach. The traditional approach must be used wherever the fields have fixed locations templates must be created for such docu ments. [. . . ]