ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Professional delivers superior accuracy, ease of use, and new robust capabilities
ABBYY software House, the technology leader in document recognition and linguistic technologies, today announced ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Professional. The new software delivers significant improvements in word accuracy and format retention, new ease-of-use features, added saving options, plus PDF conversion. As a result, FineReader 6.0 Professional is the most advanced OCR software, empowering users to easily convert paper-based documents and scanned images into editable text with superior accuracy. The new software is expected to be available on the 2nd of April 2002.
“Our engineers have developed impressive improvements by creating new algorithms for OCR processing and adding extensive user tools,” said Sergey Andreyev, CEO of ABBYY. “Internal tests show the new version of FineReader is more accurate than all other OCR solutions. We are excited to introduce this strong release at a time when ABBYY is gaining momentum in the worldwide OCR market and winning more awards with every new release.”
The FineReader OCR engine accurately recognizes and retains the whole document, including pictures, page layout, tables and text – even text color, inverted type, and vertical text. The new version expands these capabilities, adding significant features that improve accuracy and format retention.
FineReader 6.0 Professional includes ABBYY’s newly developed Intelligent Background Filtering technology. This innovative system uses new algorithms to filter background noise and texture, reducing the number of word errors on low-contrast, color and degraded documents – up to 35%.
The new technology employs a dynamic threshold to automatically adjust text contrast on a line-by-line basis and achieve the highest quality of recognition. In addition, the texture filtering system more effectively detects and removes background noise and texture that could interfere with word recognition. Intelligent Background Filtering is particularly helpful for converting newsprint, magazine pages, faxes, copies and text printed on color or textured backgrounds.
When converting documents, FineReader does a superior job of retaining the original format. The challenge often comes when exporting the results to text-based applications. That’s why ABBYY has added new technology to better reproduce the format within Microsoft Word and Excel. These new capabilities include:
FineReader enables users to input most popular image files, including BMP, JPEG, TIFF and others. The OCR results can then be saved in a wide variety of formats, from RTF, DOC and XLS to HTML and PDF. Version 6.0 now expands these options to include:
FineReader provides an extensive set of user-friendly tools to make every step of the OCR process quicker and easier. The software enables users to convert paper documents with a single click of the Scan&Read button. Plus, the Scan&Read Assistant guides the OCR process, prompting users to select preferred settings, which can then be saved to automate repetitive projects. In addition, FineReader 6.0 Professional offers many new ease-of-use enhancements and robust features:
FineReader 6.0 Professional requires an Intel® Pentium® 200 MHz processor or higher; Microsoft® Windows® 95, 98, ME, XP, 2000, or NT® Workstation 4.0 (with Service Pack 3 or greater); 64 М B (Windows XP/2000), 32 М B (Windows Me/98/NT 4.0), 16 М B (Windows 95) of RAM, plus 16 MB of RAM for each additional processor (on a multiprocessor system); 90 MB of free hard-disk space for minimal program installation, and 70 MB of free hard-disk space for the program operation. FineReader also requires Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher (Internet Explorer 5.5 is included on the CD). Optional: FineReader supports TWAIN-compliant scanners, digital cameras and fax-modems.
ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Professional is priced at $129 (pricing may vary by region and country). The software is expected to be available on the 2nd of April 2002, and can be purchased by visiting ABBYY’s online store at http://www.abbyy.com/. In addition, the software will be available in April through major retailers and online stores, check the list of ABBYY worldwide resellers at http://www.abbyy.com/. The company also offers a 15-day “Try&Buy” version, which can be downloaded for free from ABBYY’s web site http://www.abbyy.com/.
ABBYY also plans to announce FineReader 6.0 Corporate Edition. This network version, designed for high volume OCR processing, is priced at $299. For additional information on ABBYY or its FineReader products, visit the web at: http://www.abbyy.com/.