Have you ever wondered how many man-days are spent in your company on handling incoming documents? Manual processing of invoices and orders, sorting letters and contracts, selecting financial documents, and so on takes a lot of time and resources. Such documents usually come from different sources and have varying structure and design, but contain similar types of data (company name and address, dates, sums, zip codes, etc.). And those are called semi-structured forms and documents.

ABBYY's powerful FlexiCapture technology is based on years of research and great experience in a variety of data capture projects for the government and large businesses worldwide. It allows automated capturing data from semi-structured documents by using only a scanner and an application empowered with FlexiCapture technology.

ABBYY FlexiCapture: Intelligent Data Capture
How does a human operator enter data from semi-structured documents into a computer? When looking for data, the operator is guided by various form elements and additional information available on the document, such as field titles or measurement units. In order to detect the required data the operator analyzes areas around the document fields. FlexiCapture technology enables ABBYY FormReader and applications based on ABBYY FineReader Engine to do the same.

FlexiCapture is based on the principles of Intelligent, Purposeful and Adaptable recognition (IPA), and imitates the way humans recognize objects. The purpose of FlexiCapture technology is to teach FormReader to find the required fields on flexible forms by using a special description. This formalized description, called FlexiLayoutâ„¢, tells FormReader how to look for particular fields: the program will analyze the area surrounding each element and make inferences about the nature of the fields and their content. ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio is a software tool that creates FlexiLayouts.

ABBYY FlexiCapture technology gives the system increased intelligence and flexibility and provides a solution for various problems occurring in data capture. Once you have created the FlexiLayout for your forms by using FlexiCapture Studio, you won't have the problem of matching the templates with the forms that have similar data but different layouts. The program will find all the fields using the information provided by the FlexiLayout: location of the field relative to other objects on the form, type of data in the field, its size, lines drawn around the field, etc.