Excerpt from AIIM’s new Capture Software Product Study on What is Capture?… Document capture software is the front-end software that is used to convert unstructured and semi-structured paper or formatted electronic business documents (e.g., various PDF files or faxes), and other unstructured content-centric business documents into an indexed image and then automatically use pattern recognition technologies supplemented by business rules to extract accurate data and add pertinent metadata for use in one or more business processes. These documents and associated relevant data are validated and then placed into document and records management workflow; put in centralized or distributed repositories; or published electronically on the Internet or an intranet; while the data is used to incept or add to business process transactions. In its most basic form, capture is simply scanning and indexing the image of the document. At its most complex it consists of a series of modular components to accurately convert many thousands of pages of documents a day to images and associated validated data, whether received as paper, fax, or within email. The systems can scan documents; analyze and classify them according to known layouts; convert areas and fields of information using pattern recognition (OCR, ICR, OMR, and…

Excerpt from AIIM’s new Capture Software Product Study on What is Capture?… Document capture software is the front-end software that is used to convert unstructured and semi-structured paper or formatted electronic business documents (e.g., various PDF files or faxes), and other unstructured content-centric business documents into an indexed image and then automatically use pattern recognition technologies supplemented by business rules to extract accurate data and add pertinent metadata for use in one or more business processes. These documents and associated relevant data are validated and then placed into document and records management workflow; put in centralized or distributed repositories; or published electronically on the Internet or an intranet; while the data is used to incept or add to business process transactions. In its most basic form, capture is simply scanning and indexing the image of the document. At its most complex it consists of a series of modular components to accurately convert many thousands of pages of documents a day to images and associated validated data, whether received as paper, fax, or within email. The systems can scan documents; analyze and classify them according to known layouts; convert areas and fields of information using pattern recognition (OCR, ICR, OMR, and…

Excerpt from AIIM’s new Capture Software Product Study on Standard Output Image Formats… As bandwidths were limited when the imaging and document management industry began, the industry adopted 200 dots-per-inch TIFF Group 4 compressed black and white images as their standard (which created a roughly 75K KB image for a standard page of text). A secondary advantage to the TIFF group 4 format was that it is a loss-less compression standard—i.e., no image data is removed during the compression. Each vendor then added some specific headers which made their formats unique. Third-party capture vendors therefore had to create “formatters” or “release scripts” in order to create an image that would seamlessly import into the document management systems. In the photographic and consumer world, a lossy standard named JPEG became ubiquitous and is used exclusively in mobile phone captured images. The accuracy of OCR and other recognition technologies from a JPEG compressed format depends not only on resolution but also on the amount of loss that was taken when the image was compressed. Usually compression can be as much as 80% without much loss, but this very much dependent on the complexity (busyness) of the images since JPEG encodes areas of…

Excerpt from AIIM’s new Capture Software Product Study on Standard Output Image Formats… As bandwidths were limited when the imaging and document management industry began, the industry adopted 200 dots-per-inch TIFF Group 4 compressed black and white images as their standard (which created a roughly 75K KB image for a standard page of text). A secondary advantage to the TIFF group 4 format was that it is a loss-less compression standard—i.e., no image data is removed during the compression. Each vendor then added some specific headers which made their formats unique. Third-party capture vendors therefore had to create “formatters” or “release scripts” in order to create an image that would seamlessly import into the document management systems. In the photographic and consumer world, a lossy standard named JPEG became ubiquitous and is used exclusively in mobile phone captured images. The accuracy of OCR and other recognition technologies from a JPEG compressed format depends not only on resolution but also on the amount of loss that was taken when the image was compressed. Usually compression can be as much as 80% without much loss, but this very much dependent on the complexity (busyness) of the images since JPEG encodes areas of…