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Government | Document Processing

ABBYY FlexiCapture helps Korean businessmen to patent their products

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ABBYY FlexiCapture helps Korean businessmen to patent their products

Government | Document Processing

Customer Overview

Name Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO)
Headquarters Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Industry Governmental authority for intellectual property
Web

Partner Overview

Name ReTIA
Headquarters Gasan, Seoul
Web
CHALLENGE

Automate cross-referencing within application sets (between specification and drawings)

SOLUTION

ABBYY FlexiCapture

RESULTS
  • 42,000 pages processed per day
  • Improved customer service

Patents are not a new trend nowadays. Businessmen all around the world protect their Trade Marks (TMs) with patents from illegal use of their inventions and unpleasant consequences of such use. Also modern patents help to indicate the origin of the product, to guarantee its high quality in some way, and to promote technological innovation and industrial development on the whole.

Korean businessmen also enjoy the benefits and patent their inventions. The Patent Institute was established in 1946 in Korea. Today the organization which deals with patents there is the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO). But since that time the number of TMs has multiplied greatly and the patent application procedure also suffered many changes, though it is not perfect yet.

Challenge

Nowadays a patent application consists of a specification and drawings of the product. The documents are submitted in different formats: PDF, XML, TIFF or JPEG-files. The body of the specification has references to figure numbers in the drawings but there are no hyperlinks between them. It is quite difficult and time consuming to process and examine numerous application sets using an ordinary OCR: figure numbers in the drawings in most cases are treated as part of the drawing and only 10-30% of them are extracted.

The whole process drags on and turns to be too complex both for the patent authority and the applicants. To find a reasonable and the most suitable solution the KIPO consulted the most experienced expert in OCR technologies in Korea – company ReTIA.

Project

ReTIA has over 10 years of experience in the market and numerous worldknown customers, such as Sindoh, Canon, HYUNDAI, LG, DAUM, DOOSAN, HonestVision and others. ReTIA expert team offered ABBYY FlexiCapture 10 as the solution – the next generation of intelligent, accurate and highly scalable data capture and document processing software.

Document processing is held in the following way: both specifications and drawings in the original formats are loaded into the system, which classifies them automatically. All the data including texts, pictures and tables are recognized and analyzed.

On the next step FlexiLayout Technology – one of the components of the system – accurately extracts all the figure numbers. The data are verified and the information is exported into XML-files for further processing and storage.

Distributed architecture of the solution with two Quad-Core Processing Stations ensures high volume document capture.

Results

Using ReTIA Solution based on ABBYY FlexiCapture software, the KIPO greatly reduced time for patent examination and improved customer service, making it better, easier and faster for both parties. The single solution for processing patent drawings in different original formats automatically processes 42 000 pages per day with the least possible human control.

ReTIA once again confirmed the high quality of their solutions and deserved trust of the governmental organization – Korean Intellectual Property Office, and Korean businessmen got another stimulus to patent their products, as the process is quick and easy now.

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