By Don Dew, Sr. Marketing Manager

Last month on this blog I recapped my trip to the AIIM Document Management Service Providers Executive Forum. As noted, I found a healthy degree of skepticism to whether or not ICR for handwriting (including cursive) was a viable forms automation tool.

In 2012 we’re setting out to address the misconceptions and set the expectations straight. ICR can be very powerful for forms automation – but it may not be for everyone.

Feel free to join us on January 19th for a live webinar, Keys to Successful Handwriting Recognition. Here we’ll shed some light on how to optimize an ICR solution for best performance, and provide some insights into the latest in ICR technology.

Here’s the signup link, hope to see you there!

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/698567314

By Don Dew, Sr. Marketing Manager

Last week, I escaped Denver during a fall snowstorm to attend the AIIM Document Management Service Provider Executive Forum in Hollywood, Florida. It was great to meet so many new and interesting people. I found the sessions on healthcare and digital mailroom particularly interesting – and Dan O’Leary and Atle Skjekkeland just hit it home with their social media presentation at the end.

What I also found interesting was a really healthy dosage of skepticism towards Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) in forms processing. A lot of people have tried it but the results were less than desirable, so there’s understandably some skepticism around it. I’ll take a swipe at the recognition industry and suggest that this is what happens when capabilities are oversold.

ICR for forms processing can be an incredibly powerful business automation tool, and can drive a lot of cost out of forms processing. However ICR is both an art and science. The key to success lies in defining context. In check and postal processing, recognition rates can be over 95% with less than a 1% error rate. That’s because when reading a check and an address, you know what the fields are supposed to be, and have standards to compare against. That general bit of knowledge enables the software to reverse engineer the right answer.

Many forms contain constrained fields as well. Applying context to these fields can dramatically increase recognition rates, and then exception rules can be built to optimize the use of manual keying. It would be difficult to believe that we can remove the human factor completely (IBM makes a good run at it with Watson) but by applying a blended ICR and human-keying practice you’ll be able to greatly reduce processing costs and increase productivity.

Pictures from the event can be found on the AIIM Facebook page: here.

by Claudette Allingham, Marketing Manager

Parascript is proud to be a recipient of the 2011 Longmont Area Economic Council Community Appreciation Award for our work with There With Care. There With Care is a non-profit organization supporting children and families facing critical illness in Colorado. We dedicated the Parascript 10th Annual Art Exhibition to raise funds with a care drive, silent auction, and the sale of calendars featuring the artwork.

We are honored to have received this award and to support such an important organization that provides much needed services to families going through a medical crisis. We are also very proud to showcase the amazing talent we have in our company with our annual art exhibition. Employees and their families participate with photography, paintings, pottery, drawings, etc. The exhibition also features artwork created by children in There With Care program. We invite you to check out There With Care online at www.therewithcare.org.

Paula Barton, vice president of human resources, received the award along with Paula DuPre’, executive director and founder of There With Care.

Japanese Lady and Daughter by Sofia Prizemin, age 10.

by Don Dew, Sr. Marketing Manager

Last week I went to the Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) summit in Orlando. This was my first RDC summit – and with a declining check volume (Federal Reserve stats show a 41.5% decline from 2000-2009) – I was half expecting an event with waning interest. Was I ever wrong!

I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of attendance and engagement both in the general and breakout sessions. The topics were relevant, and there’s a lot of interest around how banks and credit unions can leverage the benefits of mobile capture in order to receive deposits from consumer cell phones. We learned that not only is the technology a significant convenience for consumers (and cost reduction for financial institutions) – it may be the single largest contributor to customer retention in the market today.

There was also a lot of discussion around RDC as a remote payment hub – broadening the concept well beyond checks – as well as its application in lockbox environments.

Many of Parascript’s partners were present as well – providing the enabling technologies behind RDC. It was great to connect with them and learn more about how our technology continues to serve this market.

Hope to see you there next time!

Remote Deposit Capture

by Don Dew, Sr. Marketing Manager

The U.S. economy and the USPS are intrinsically tied

There’s a lot of speculation about what will happen with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) when it officially runs out of money at the end of September. And the pundits are doubling down. Political brinkmanship will likely run until the last minute, perhaps even a little bit beyond. But the bottom line is that it is inconceivable that the USPS would not get relief from the government.

The USPS moves too much of the country’s economy to let it suspend operations. Continue Reading »

This post is one of a series adapted from our recent whitepaper: Image and Character Recognition – What You Need to Know to Be Successful. It is available for complimentary download.

While the industry historically has benchmarked recognition products based upon character-reading accuracy, in reality the studies may not be an accurate indication of attainable performance. New recognition products take a different approach, focusing on recognition of the entire word in addition to individual characters.

A sophisticated technological approach delivers real improvements in overall recognition rates, resulting in cost savings for companies who can implement this approach. In the following pages, you will receive a primer on the technological evolution in character recognition and how advanced recognition engines combine all three reading methods – OCR, ICR and NHR – to deliver maximum accuracy.

Evolution of OCR and ICR

The two most common types of traditional recognition engines include optical character recognition (OCR), which is used Continue Reading »

This post is one of a series adapted from our recent whitepaper: Image and Character Recognition — What You Need to Know to Be Successful. It is available for complimentary download.

Defining OCR, ICR and NHR: Exploring the technology and methods that are driving today’s biggest character recognition efficiency gains in the commercial arena

In the next few posts, we’ll share the basics and evolution of image and character recognition; discuss the three major types of automated image, optical and intelligent character recognition; and explore the powerful performance and productivity gains that can result from combining the best of all three.

The History and Driving Forces of Automated Image and Character Recognition

Herman Hollerith introduced punch-card automation at the time of the 1890 U.S. census. The world’s first data entry operators manually encoded handwritten ledger entries from holes in roughly 50 million punch cards. Processed by hand, these early cards defined an American population of close to 62 million.

Over the next 60 years, manual data entry represented the only available method for creating machine-readable information. Manual data entry is still the most Continue Reading »

This is adapted from United Business Mail Obtains Automation Rate Discounts and Improves Delivery of Mail with Optical Character Recognition Technology from Parascript, available for free download from Parascript.

United Business Mail is a presort mail services company providing postage savings to businesses for first class letters and flats, standard/non-profit letters and flats, bound printed matter, presort parcels, and more. Additionally, United Business Mail provides complete mailroom and metering services to allow customers to reduce the overhead costs associated with these functions.

Annually, United Business Mail processes over 250 million pieces of first-class and standard mail from hundreds of customers across the country.

United Business Mail had used Parascript, as the only optical character recognition (OCR) technology to process handwritten mail, at its Minneapolis facility for nearly 10 years and its Phoenix facility for over five. When it opened its Los Angeles facility, management of the mailing company determined it only made sense to invest in the best handwriting recognition technology for letters and flats. Continue Reading »

In a previous post on Image Recognition Performance, we discussed the “tuning process” that can help companies who are using automated forms processing and character recognition processes find their ideal point on an accuracy/cost curve. The supporting graph tracked an actual Parascript customer’s error rate versus acceptance rate for documents.

In this post, we explore the cost of errors and rejects in a hypothetical company’s manual processing situation.

With recognition, there are two important variables affecting success rates that are specific to a customer: errors and rejects. Errors are issues involved with false data recognition. In this instance, data is passed onto another system that is incorrect. A reject occurs when the confidence rate Continue Reading »

Measuring and Tuning Results

Just as each company has unique objectives and processes that will determine how automated recognition technology is deployed, so will each company experience varying degrees of cost reduction. With the technology in place, gains can be measured and new benchmarks set through a tuning process that takes into account the accepted error rate balanced by desired throughput. Companies will be able to fine-tune their automated recognition processes and establish their own accuracy/cost “curve” that serves as a quantifiable basis for discovering what the outcomes are, and how to get even better. Continuous tuning based on feedback will drive an organization closer to optimal read/accuracy rates.

A Performance & Tuning Example

The following chart presents actual recognition data showing the direct relationship between the recognition error rate and the associated information acceptance rate. Continue Reading »