ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio Features

Key Features

• Uses unique technology to describe layouts of semi-structured and flexible forms. The power and flexibility of the technology is based on ABBYY's years of experience in development of large-scale forms processing projects.
• Simplifies creating, editing and testing flexible form descriptions with the help of a refined visualization environment.
• Creates a FlexiLayout at two levels: either in the program's dialog boxes or using the special FlexiLayout language.
• Uses a unique algorithm to detect data fields: analyzes whole sets of form objects to identify the required data.
• Exports flexible form descriptions - FlexiLayout - both to ABBYY FormReader and to ABBYY FineReader Engine.

All Features

Interface

• Visualization environment for FlexiLayout creation, editing and testing.
• Blocks and elements are highlighted in different colors depending on their type and status (found/not found). Blocks and elements can be shown/hidden for the sake of convenience.
• Tree view for viewing and editing FlexiLayout blocks and elements and their properties.
• Tree view for viewing hypotheses, their qualities, and connections with objects on the form.
• Program windows can be customized and resized for the optimal screen layout, FlexiLayout elements can be moved using drag&drop.

Technologies

• Uses unique technology to describe layouts of semi-structured and flexible forms.
• ABBYY's award-winning recognition technologies are used for creating and testing FlexiLayouts.

Batches and Images

• Forms in the following image formats can be used: TIFF, JPEG, PCX, DCX, PNG, BMP.
• Pre-recognition detects such objects as text, separators, barcodes, and pictures.
• The program can read texts in 177 languages and 8 types of barcode: EAN13, EAN8, Check Code 3, Check Interleaved 25, Code 39, Code 128, IATA-25, Code 39 *.

FlexiLayout Objects

• FlexiLayouts describe the structure of a form in a formal language at two levels - element level and block level.
• Data from the following five types of block can be exported into FormReader or the FineReader Engine: text, barcodes, checkmarks, pictures.
• The following types of element are available: simple elements (e.g. static text, separator, white gap, barcode, character string, text fragment, object collection and date) and compound elements, i.e. simple elements joined by AND.

FlexiLayout Creation

• Element properties are specified depending on the type of the element. Properties may have particular values or belong to a range of values.
• Objects on the form can be detected using coordinate constraints or using expressions that formally describe mutual location of elements.
• Advanced FlexiLayout language can be used to set the properties of elements and blocks and to control how objects corresponding to the elements are detected. For example, you can tell the program not to look for a particular element or to stop looking for a suitable object at a given point.
• Advanced relationships between elements can be formally described so that the program can detect the objects corresponding to the elements on the form. For example, you can tell the program to look for object A to the left/right of object B, or you can tell the program that object A will be closest to object B so that it can use object A as a reference, or tell it not to look for object A if it finds object B.
• Location of blocks can be specified in one of two ways - by linking blocks to their corresponding elements or by using the FlexiLayout language. The program automatically checks the syntax of rules written in the FlexiCapture language and displays an error message if errors are detected.
• Hypotheses (i.e. assumptions that the detected objects correspond to the elements) are based on the aggregates of elements, and not just on individual form fields.
• Hypotheses are ranked by their quality (the program estimates how well the detected object matches the description contained in the FlexiLayout and penalizes poor matches).
• The concept of a null hypothesis. Some objects can be specified as optional: if the program does not find an optional object, instead of assuming that the form and FlexiLayout cannot be matched the program will advance a null hypothesis that simply says that there is no such object on the form.
• Hypotheses are arranged in a tree-like structure, relation between a FlexiLayout element and a possible hypothesis is visualized. The user will see how the program selects the best match and adjust the FlexiLayout to achieve the matching.
• Hypotheses are grouped in clusters and displayed depending on the types of elements and search results (found/not found).

Testing FlexiLayouts

• FlexiLayouts can be tested to check that all the form objects are detected on all forms.
• The results obtained by matching a form and its FlexiLayout can be compared with a so-called reference layout, which is created manually by specifying the locations of blocks and elements on the actual form.
• The results obtained by matching a form and its FlexiLayout can be saved and used as a reference layout: it is easier to make several corrections to the matched FlexiLayout than marking out the whole layout manually.
• Step-by-step improvement of FlexiLayouts: new form samples can be gradually added so that the FlexiLayout can be tested on even more variations of a form of a particular type. The user can also save a FlexiLayout and return to it later.

Exporting FlexiLayouts

• FlexiLayouts can be exported from FlexiCapture Studio to FormReader and FineReader 7.1 Engine as *.afl files.

Protection

• The program is protected by a hardware or software protection key.

Please click here if you wish to get more information on how FlexiCapture Studio works.