FormFix v3.1

Structured Forms Processing and OMR SDK

FormFix delivers both .NET and ActiveX COM components offering bitonal template-based form identification, form registration, form drop out, and OMR technology to developers of forms processing applications. Highly flexible and optimised for speed, FormFix’s superior form recognition and form registration improve ICR, OCR, and OMR accuracy. It easily interfaces with Pegasus recognition engines (see FormSuite), and with any recognition engine supporting memory-to-memory data transfers. ImagXpress and ScanFix Xpress are included with FormFix for image handling, advanced image cleanup, and TWAIN scanning.


 

Designed to enable production-level forms processing applications, FormFix technology was used in the largest data capture project in history, the Decennial Census.

FormFix v3 is the upgrade path for customers currently using form recognition, form registration, form drop out, and OMR of bitonal images within the Prizm IP, FormFix v2.8x, or SmartScan Xpress ICR/OCR/OMR products.

Included Components
FormFix Professional - FormFix Professional v3, ScanFix Xpress Bitonal v5, ImagXpress Document v9, NotateXpress v9, ThumbnailXpress v2, TwainPRO v5, PrintPRO v4, FormDirector v1
FormFix Standard - FormFix Standard v3 (delayed to processing forms at a speed of approximately 5 seconds per page), ScanFix Xpress Lite v5, ImagXpress Standard v9, TwainPRO v5, FormDirector v1

Features

Technical Notes

• Programming environments: Win32 visual development environments including Visual Studio 2008
• Sample code is included for: VB.NET, C#, VB, Delphi, VC++, HTML
• Object-oriented API for .NET users
• Deploys within .NET as a managed control and is fully compliant with .NET 2.0 and above (see "Building Robust Imaging Components for the Microsoft .NET Platform" white paper)
• Can also be used in any development environment that hosts ActiveX COM controls
• Can be used in a multi-threaded environment and perform synchronous thread-safe processing (more).
• Professional edition includes 8 controls: FormFix, FormDirector, ScanFix, ImagXpress, NotateXpress, ThumbnailXpress, TwainPRO and PrintPRO
• Support user-specified debug logging levels
• Optimised for speed, delivers matching results at sub-second speeds
• Supports over 10,000 unique form templates as candidates for matching
• Suitable for Client/server Web applications
• Increased image processing speed available via an easy to use multiple image buffering mechanism
• Two processing speeds are available (Standard and Professional editions)
• Free full-featured trial version available for immediate download

Form Setup

• API support for setting up fields, form templates, and sets of form templates
• Flexible architecture for defining custom operations at any stage of processing
• Define OMR, text, image, or custom fields on each form
• Extensive support for form processing operations

Form Identification

• Match forms against previously defined unfilled templates and return confidence values
• Provide automatic identification without the need for registration marks, ID marks, or anchor marks
• Match forms that are rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees from template image
• Match forms that have been scaled from 90% to 110% of the template size
• Match forms scanned with resolution of 50% to 150% of the template resolution
• Match forms that are skewed up to 20 degrees by pre-processing with the included ScanFix
• Identify thousands of different forms
• Limit a recognition operation to a subset of the available templates
• Set the level of effort expended in completing form matching
• Return Identification Certainty indicating confidence of form matching
• Accept a Minimum Certainty level for acceptance as a matched form
• Return up to 100 alternative form matches of lower certainty
• Quickly identify forms, even when using very large sets of template forms

Form Registration

• Automatically align a filled form to its master template based on image contents, to within one or two pixels of the blank template without requiring registration marks
• Analyse the master template form content and determine anchor points automatically
• Adjust alignment within a drop out zone to compensate for small differences between forms
• Support an alternate registration process using anchor marks in each corner
• Register forms even when the forms exhibit these characteristics:
  • Skew (up to 20 degrees)
  • Smaller or larger image size than the template (up to 10%)
  • Forms scanned at different resolutions (up to 50% greater and lesser) than the template resolution
  • Rotation (at 90, 180, and 270 degrees from the template)

Form Drop Out

• Remove template forms at sub-second speeds
• Provide confidence values to highlight problem images
• Adjust for distortion caused by printing, copying or scanning
• Precisely remove lines, broken lines, shading, noise, guide text, and more
• Automatically repair text that intersects with lines or guide text defining the form, that was damaged during template removal (fills broken characters)
• Apply “character repair” across areas of the image where the form was removed
• Apply “character smoothing” to smooth the edges of characters for increased OCR accuracy
• Support for form drop out only within specified fields or the entire image
• Create new images using pixels cropped from a source image (field clips)
  
  
  
  BEFOREAFTER

OMR (Optical Mark Recognition and Mark Sense)

• Detect the presence or absence of marks or characters (for verification of signature presence for example)
• Support programmatic specification for bubble shape
• Support OMR recognition at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree orientation
• Specify fields as grids (rows by columns) or single bubbles
• Support single and multiple mark recognition
• Recognise check-marked check boxes
• Set custom recognition parameters on a per-field basis
• Allow an unlimited number of fields
• Support programmatic specification for threshold for positive marks
• Return confidence values to check accuracy of OMR

Form Overlay

• Enables the use of dropout to access the filled, variable data
• Overlay archived “data only” file over form template for display or print
• This process dramatically reduces storage requirements
• Increase data transmission speed

Image Input, Image Output, and Image Handling

• FormFix Professional includes ImagXpress Document (read the full ImagXpress Document v8 product description) for image viewing, compression, conversion, thumbnail image support, document image processing and editing, TWAIN scanning, annotation, printing, and more
• FormFix Standard includes ImagXpress Standard (read the full ImagXpress Standard v8 product description) for basic image conversion, image processing, and TWAIN scanning

Bitonal Image Cleanup

• FormFix Professional includes ScanFix Xpress (read the full ScanFix Xpress v5 product description) for advanced bitonal image cleanup technology such as dot shading removal, line removal, character smoothing, inverse text correction, hole punch removal, deskew, despeckle, rotate, mirror, flip and more
• FormFix Standard includes ScanFix Xpress Lite for bitonal image cleanup technology such as deskew, despeckle, rotate, mirror, flip and more

Image and Data Transfer Tool

• Included with FormFix is the FormDirector component, providing communication among multiple Pegasus Imaging components (including FormFix, SmartZone, and ScanFix Xpress)
• Assists in organising, storing, and retrieving the descriptions and control parameters you will use while processing forms
• Supports reading, revising and writing form template set files
• Supports reading, revising and writing form template definition files
• Handles over 10,000 unique form templates
• For bitonal files (greyscale and colour will be supported in a future edition)
• Supports Unicode characters
• Supports customisation, including customer-defined field types and private customer data attached to form sets, forms, and fields
• Replaces the form definition and form drop out features of SmartScan Xpress ICR/OCR/OMR (form definition files), FormFix (table files), and Prizm Colour IP (form definition and form suite files)
  
  

Edition Descriptions

FormFix Professional is designed for commercial forms processing application developers. It provides the full speed and power of FormFix, includes ImagXpress Document for multi-page document and annotation support, and includes ScanFix Xpress for powerful bitonal image cleanup.

FormFix Standard is designed for developers deploying a low volume forms processing solution using single-page forms and not requiring advanced image cleanup. FormFix Standard is delayed to processing forms at a speed of approximately 5 seconds per page. It includes ImagXpress Standard and includes ScanFix Xpress Lite for standard deskew, despeckle, rotate, mirror, flip, line removal, and more.

FormAssist Sample Application with Source Code

• Quickly evaluate Pegasus Imaging’s forms processing technology, including:
  • Form identification (FormFix)
  • Form dropout (FormFix)
  • Zonal OCR (SmartZone)
  • OMR mark recognition for check-boxes and bubbles (FormFix)
  • Image display and editing (ImagXpress)
  • Image cleanup (ScanFix Xpress)
• Use FormAssist source code as a foundation for developing your production forms processing application:
  • Modular source code facilitates rapid development of form setup and forms processing solutions
  • Illustrates best practice for integration of Pegasus components and example workflow
  • Included in the FormSuite .NET toolkit download as C# source code
• Quickly set up forms and processing instructions
  • Create, save, and manage form sets
  • Add form templates to form sets
  • Set up and add recognition fields to form templates
  • Configure properties for image cleanup, OCR, ICR, OMR, and processing
  • Process filled images to optimise settings for OCR, ICR,OMR, and form identification

Benefits

Rapid form identification
FormFix rapidly matches incoming images to the correct form in the form set. Advanced proprietary algorithms are applied to avoid exponentially-increasing processing time often associated with large form databases. This makes FormFix the perfect solution for high-volume form identification.

Accurate identification and registration
FormFix includes automatic scaling, rotation, and warp-compensation algorithms to accurately identify incoming forms and precisely register them against template images. Accurate registration results in improved OCR and OMR accuracy.

Registration marks not required
You don’t need control over the design of forms to obtain accurate registration with your template images. Since FormFix automatically catalogues the unique identifying features of each template provided, your forms don’t require targets, cross-hairs, or other marks. You can operate with forms from any source, and do not need to add the clutter of additional marks to obtain precise registration.

Dropout improves recognition accuracy
FormFix template form dropout, with scaling, character repair, confidence reporting and other advanced features, leaves you with clean images of the variable data fields that yield far more accurate recognition results.

Tightly integrated with other Pegasus Imaging components
FormFix was designed specifically to work with other FormSuite components, including ScanFix and SmartZone. Sending image clips and instructions between components is easy to implement and executes quickly. This architecture enables development of highly-evolved custom solutions that optimise accuracy.

Flexible OMR features for fast, accurate recognition
Advanced OMR features include support for grids of bubbles arranged in rows and columns, multiple arrays of bubbles in various orientations on a single image, specification of bubble shapes, customisable minimum confidence thresholds, and prioritised recognition of multiple marks in each array. These features make it easy to specify how forms are processed, and improve the speed and accuracy of mark recognition.

For more information please contact the MicroWay sales team:
Head Office MicroWay Pty Ltd PO Box 84, Braeside, Victoria, 3195, Australia Ph: 1300 553 313 Fax: 1300 132 709 email: sales@microway.com.au ABN: 56 129 024 825	Sydney Sales Office MicroWay Pty Ltd PO Box 1733, Crows Nest, NSW 1585, Australia Tel: 1300 553 313 Fax: 1300 132 709 email: sales@microway.com.au ABN: 56 129 024 825	New Zealand Sales Office MicroWay Pty Ltd (NZ) PO Box 912026 Victoria Street West Auckland 1142, New Zealand Tel: 0800 450 168 email: sales@microway.co.nz
International: call +61 3 9580 1333, fax +61 3 9580 8995