Automated forms-processing software and services

While document-image systems for the management of collections of documents, such as forms, offer significant productivity improvements, the entry of information from documents remains a labor-intensive and costly task for most organizations. In this paper, we describe a software system for the machine reading of forms data from their scanned images. We describe its major components: form recognition and "dropout," intelligent character recognition (ICR), and contextual checking. Finally, we describe applications for which our automated forms reader has been successfully used.