CVISION Technologies

Question: I am looking for an OCR program that is compatible with Windows. Is The OCR program in PdfCompressor compatible with Windows?

Answer: Yes, you can use our PdfCompressor OCR module on Windows. If you are looking for an OCR download for Windows I would suggest trying either PdfCompressor Professional or Desktop, both are equipped with OCR.
The Professional Version of PdfCompressor features improved color and bitonal compression, allowing for documents that are up to 100x smaller than their original. In addition to the compression results, the product has OCR capabilities.
The Desktop Version of PdfCompressor would also be a strong option for an OCR Download. The Desktop Edition is a “lite” alternative to the Professional Edition. It is designed to compress only a single document at a time, each of which does not exceed 100 pages. You can test out the OCR on this download as well.

We offer full tech support with our free 30 day evaluation of the Professional or the Desktop download. If you are interested in either product as a potential OCR Download, I have attached the link below.
http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html

To see other Blog entries discussing OCR, the advantages of OCR, and how and when to use OCR, click on this link: http://www.cvisiontech.com/wordpress/?cat=5

Question: I currently have PDFs as part of my workflow, I am interested in learning a method to shrink these PDF files.

Answer: Our PdfCompressor helps shrink, and convert PDF, TIFF, and JPEG files into compressed, web-optimized, and text searchable PDF files. The PdfCompressor shrinks PDF file size of scanned color PDFs up to 1/100th of the size, and shrinks scanned black & white PDFs up to 1/10th of the size.

You can download our free 30-day evaluation copy, http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html.

Question: I have too many large PDF files occupying my storage space and slowing down email transfers. I’ve heard of PDF compression but am not completely sure of how it works. I would like to know more about PDF compression and if it can help solve my problems.

Answer: PDF compression is an ideal solution to problems like yours. With PDF compression, you will have smaller sized files, which means it will take less time to email PDF attachments. PDF compression also increases the amount of storage space on your hard drive by reducing the size of these files.

For a free 30-day trial of CVISION’s PdfCompressor, try the link below:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html

Question: I am looking for software to reduce Adobe Acrobat PDFs file size. How can I try PdfCompressor?

Answer: CVISION’s software helps convert PDF, TIFF, and JPEG files into compressed, Web-optimized and text-searchable PDF files. CVISION software creates the World’s most compressed PDF files equipped with OCR. Our CVista PdfCompressor will reduce black & white documents to 1/10th of their size and color documents to 1/100th of their size. These compressed PDFs are viewable with Adobe’s free reader.

You can download our free 30-day evaluation copy, http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html.

Question: We have documents that have been degraded due to undersampling and JPEG compression. I have tried several OCR engines, none of which is picking up the text reliably. What should I do? We need to search these documents!

Answer: There is an old maxim of “garbage in, garbage out”. So the quality of the input documents really does matter. There is a gap between human readability and machine readability. Just because you can read the document does not mean that your OCR program can.

There are several steps that can be taken to improve your OCR results in this kind of situation:

1. Verify that the existing resolution (dpi) is correct. OCR engines are calibrated based on the dpi that is typically given in the image header file. If this value is incorrect, then the OCR results will degrade.

2. Assuming the dpi has now been set correctly, upsample to a reasonably high dpi. Typically, 300 dpi is a good number. The upsampling method does matter - use bicubic spline interpolation.

3. OCR engines usually perform better on bitonal documents that are thresholded correctly than on the original color files. Of course, if the threshold is poorly chosen, the OCR engine is better off with the original color or grayscale image file. So if possible, threshold each upsampled image file manually so that the text is most readable.

Obviously, in a batch production environment, step 3 which is manual would not be practical. CVISION’s PdfCompressor OCR engine http://www.cvisiontech.com/pdf_compressor_31.html does try to mimic these steps (1-3) for degraded image documents.

Question: We scan about 1000 images daily; storage size is becoming more of an issue. Considering we deal with such a large volume of scanned files, we need a program to batch compress these PDFs. Do you offer a program to batch compress PDF files?

Answer: Yes, PdfCompressor Professional edition is designed for corporate, batch compression, and OCR. If you are interested in testing the product for 30 days, I have attached a link to download below:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/pdfpro40_download.html

Question: I would like to OCR my imaged PDF files to create searchable PDFs. Can I use PdfCompressor to do this? Will it convert my PDFs to searchable PDFs?

Answer: Yes, if you use PdfCompressor with OCR you can convert your PDFs to searchable PDFs. PdfCompressor compresses the size of documents images, and makes them text-searchable with OCR.

If you are interested in a free trial, I have attached the link below:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html

There is a general tradeoff between OCR speed and accuracy. The accuracy is generally a function of the OCR engine speed. It is usually possible to obtain greater OCR accuracy by running the engine longer, or by deploying more OCR engines. The problem, however, becomes one of diminishing returns.

Let’s say the OCR engine has to run twice as long to diminish the remaining error rate by half. Say, for example, there’s an error rate of 2% when the OCR engine is run in normal mode, which might have a processing speed of 3 seconds per page. There might also be an accurate mode, with an error rate of 1% and a processing speed of 6 seconds per page. Let’s also assume there is a super-accurate mode with an error rate of 0.5 % and a processing speed of 12 seconds per page. This might correspond in some systems to the number of OCR engines that are run.

In any event, even assuming that there are as many as 10 OCR engines, or super-accurate modes, for most companies there is a point of diminishing returns, that is, a point at which it is not worth slowing down the OCR processing rate any more, even if the tradeoff is greater accuracy.

So what often needs to be established, sometimes empirically through trial and error, is what degree of accuracy is required for a given Company? How accurate is accurate enough? What processing rate is acceptable within a given workflow?

Sometimes greater OCR accuracy can be achieved without increasing processing time. This often involves either some form learning or optimizing for a given application domain.

Question: Does your OCR engine support Hewlett Packard scanners?

Answer: Yes, our OCR engine is compatible with Hewlett Packard scanners. If you are looking for an OCR download for a Hewlett Packard scanner I would suggest trying either PdfCompressor Professional or Desktop, both are equipped with OCR.

The Professional Version of PdfCompressor features improved color and bitonal compression, allowing for documents that are up to 100x smaller than their original. In addition to the compression results, the product has super-accurate OCR capabilities for over 60 languages.

The Desktop Version of PdfCompressor would also be a strong option for a Hewlett Packard OCR Download. The Desktop Edition is a “lite” alternative to the Professional Edition. It is designed to compress only a single document at a time, each of which does not exceed 100 pages. You can test out the OCR on this download as well.

We offer full tech support with our free 30 day evaluation of the Professional or the Desktop download. If you are interested in either product as a potential OCR Download, I have attached the link below.

http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html
To see other Blog entries discussing OCR, the advantages of OCR, and how and when to use OCR, click on this link:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/wordpress/?cat=5

Question: What Font/Size would you recommend to increase the accuracy of the OCR’ing? Will all upper case help or not?

Answer: The best font to use is “Courier” or “Times New Roman” and the size should be between 9 and 20.

If you are interested in evaluating PdfCompressor for free, click the link below:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/pdfpro40_download.html