Image Processing

Upon receiving images, FineReader Engine performs a range of image processing functions to improve the quality of document images for further recognition or archiving:

Basic image processing functions
FineReader Engine offers a number of image processing functions for necessary image manipulations, such as:

image scaling
image clipping
creating previews
image rotation (90, 180, and 270 degrees)
lines straightening
mirroring and inverting

Automated image de-skewing
It is an essential document imaging function which is applied to scanned documents requiring the compensation for image skew. It does not require leading edge borders or lines. New FineReader Engine 9.0 provides several methods for de-skewing images: with pairs of black squares, lines or lines of text.

Splitting dual pages
It is used for scanning books as broadsides – for both left and right pages. The recognition quality is higher if the page is split into two, with each page corresponding to a single book page. Recognition and layout analysis are then performed separately for each page, along with the de-skewing if required.

Image despeckling (or image clean-up)
The function is designed to eliminate random noise (speckles). A document image may have a large amount of "dust" on it, i.e. a large number of excess dots. The dots arise in the case of medium-to-low print quality of documents, and dots located close to character outlines may have an adverse effect on recognition quality. In these cases, the despeckle technique helps to improve the recognition quality.

Texture filtering and Adaptive Binarization
Texture filtering technology helps to filter out background "noise" such as color and texture, increasing accuracy for difficult-to-read documents such as newsprint, color documents, faxes, and copies.
Innovative Adaptive Binarization technology dynamically adjusts threshold of brightness for each image fragment during the recognition. By applying individual recognition parameters, it produces accurate recognition results for documents with gray or color-variable contrast background and textures.

Autodetection of page orientation (90, 180, and 270 degrees)
This document imaging feature is very important for bulk input of images, when the direction in which document pages are scanned is unknown and can be different. The system automatically detects the orientation of each page and corrects it if needed.

Adjusting text and background color
This function is designed for users working with archiving and document management systems (DMS). When sending a recognized document for archiving, it is saved as both an image and plain text, with the text archive index containing coordinates of each character on the image. When searching through the electronic archive, a user receives a document image as a result. To make the text found on the image clearly visible, the program highlights it and, if necessary, changes the initial color of the text and background by performing this document imaging function.

ABBYY Camera OCR technology
The technology intelligently identifies images captured with digital cameras and applies special image processing algorithms to correct distortions typically associated with digital camera images such as out-of-focus text, curved text lines, missing information about resolution or distortions caused by poor lighting,.

Despeckling images in individual blocks (or zones), with the ability to specify the size of black dots.

Data extraction from fields with various borders and frames, such as combo box, underlined fields, boxes, etc.

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