ICR Software

About ICR Software

ICR software is similar to optical character recognition (OCR) and is sometime used in combination with OCR software in form processing. However, while OCR software is able to read unstructured machine-printed text of good quality, ICR software has strict forms design requirements.

First ICR Software

First ICR software employed a topological approach to recognition. The term 'topological' is broadly defined as including curve tracing, feature analysis, matrix matching and topological recognologies. Besides this approach virtually every ICR software or “engine” in today’s marketplace involves some kind a self-learning system referred to as a neural network. To some extent neural network engines emulate the way humans think. They can be trained to accurately recognize instances of highly variable patterns like hand print by exposing them to a multitude of examples of hand print characters.

Evolution of ICR Software

An important development of ICR software was the invention of Automated Forms Processing in 1993. This involved a three stage process of capturing the image of the form to be processed by ICR software and preparing it to enable the ICR engine to give best results, then capturing the information using the engine and finally processing the results to automatically validate the output from the ICR engine.

ICR software performs image analysis to properly align the image, match ICR zones with expected data fields, and begin categorizing the data as hand print, typed characters, or other data types. Lines and boxes on the form may be dropped out, and image de-speckling or other image enhancement activities may occur. An ICR template is used to identify fields of character data on the image. These fields are broken down into discrete characters that are then classified by ICR software algorithms. ICR recognition engine also assigns confidence values to these discrete characters. The engine ranks alternate possibilities for characters and then chooses the most likely outcomes. Post ICR processing routines can include data validation for certain form fields with spell-checkers, check-sum routines, and database look-up tables.

This application of ICR software increased the usefulness of the technology and made it applicable for use with real world forms in current business applications.

Learn about OCR Software.
Learn about Forms Processing Software.