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. | ImageBASIC Access to High Accuracy "Voting" OCR through PrimeOCR.
ImageBASIC version 3.0 will include a VBX for the most advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software available on the market today, developed by Prime Recognition. Prime Recognition's award-winning PrimeOCR achieves 65-80% higher accuracy than the best conventional OCR products through the implementation of "Voting" OCR technology. The term "Voting" is used because PrimeOCR licenses OCR software from the top 5 conventional OCR vendors and compares the results of each to achieve optimal character recognition. The base PrimeOCR configuration uses OCR engines from Caere, Calera, and Xerox to achieve a 65% accuracy improvement. A higher-end version of PrimeOCR adds OCR engines from Maxsoft-Ocron and Expervision to achieve an 80% accuracy improvement over conventional OCR. Accessing PrimeOCR from ImageBASIC prior to Version 3.0 For those ImageBASIC developers who require access to PrimeOCR prior to the ImageBASIC version 3.0 release, Prime Recognition has created a series of function calls to the PrimeOCR DLL which can be easily programmed from Visual Basic. Prime Recognition will supply working Visual Basic source code, Definition files, and full documentation to facilitate your development. Special care was taken to make all return values an integer, string, or single dimensional array so as to facilitate access by Visual Basic Major Cost Savings Through Higher OCR Accuracy The significance of a 65-80% accuracy improvement over conventional OCR becomes apparent when you take into account the cost of correcting OCR errors. Conventional OCR products will achieve about 98% average recognition accuracy, which still leaves 40 errors on a typical 2000 character text page. At up to $25/hour for a key entry clerk, correcting these errors manually can be expensive. PrimeOCR's higher accuracy rates produce 65-80% fewer OCR errors that have to be corrected by hand, which reduces manual labor and associated workstation costs by 65-80%. Looking at it from an annual basis, manual error correction often accounts for over 50% of the imaging system cost in OCR-intensive applications. By implementing PrimeOCR, ImageBASIC users can see a 35-40% drop in their total annual imaging system costs. PrimeOCR's higher accuracy on low quality documents will also allow you to cost-effectively OCR many of those images that used to be keyed in by hand. End-User Access to PrimeOCR through PrimeProof To give end-users access to PrimeOCR, Prime Recognition used the Visual Programming Tools provided by ImageBASIC to develop PrimeProof. PrimeProof consists of two applications for sending images to PrimeOCR and viewing PrimeOCR results. The PrimeProof Zoning application allows users to view image documents, select text to OCR, specify OCR parameters and submit images to PrimeOCR using mouse clicks or keystrokes. The PrimeProof Verifier application presents a split screen display where recognized text and the original image document can be viewed simultaneously for "heads-up" style editing. Prime Recognition, Inc. Prime Recognition designs and develops advanced character recognition software for the production OCR marketplace. Prime Recognition's goal is to facilitate the acceptance of OCR by reducing errors through the use of sophisticated "Voting" technology. Headquartered in San Carlos, California, Prime Recognition markets its products through systems integrators and imaging application vendors. For further information, contact Kenn Dahl, Prime Recognition, at (650) 631-9800 |
