high volume scanning and ocr automatic solution?

Question

We need a high volume scanning and ocr solution

we are talkin about digitalizing about 4000 documents a day, and saving them as pdf file with ocr (with hidden text)...

the solution should let the operators scan a document and automatically save the files to a specific network resource, to be taken by an app that uploads it to a DB...

we are evaluating an enterprise solution from kofax http://www.kofax.com/

what other products are you aware of?

any experience with similar requirements?

any open source (or at least accesible) solution?

com, activex api support?

Answer 1

Kofax is not very useful or user-friendly (per my counterparts working with the County). It's adequate, but not good.

We use an all Adobe solution. Details to follow (I'm not in charge of running that area, so I have to gather some information for you).

Update: We use

Adobe Acrobat Capture 3.0
Two RICOH Color Scanner IS760D with ADF
Acrobat Standard or Professional (depending upon the user)

We have an extensive library (almost 6,000 documents) with hundreds of thousands of scanned pages available. The computer doing the scanning has a dongle on it that we purchase (250,000 scans until we need to purchase an 'update'); I don't have the cost available since the gentleman that handles that has gone home for the day, but I remember it being in the micro-cents per page.

We often scan documents with several hundred pages that need to be done that day and we have no problem completing that task.

A link to some of our efforts (a web front-end, or sorts, to our library) is available at http://acequia.ccrfcd.org/FileLibrary2/FileLibrary.aspx if you'd like to get an idea of what we've done.

As for putting these PDFs into a database, it'd be pretty easy to create an application (perhaps a service) to monitor a directory and grab each PDF that pops up there after Capture runs, copy the information to the database, then either delete it or move it to its new home.

Answer 2

There are many vendors of scanning products that can do what you want - scan, index, generate PDF with OCR overlay (personally, I prefer OCR underlay in a PDF). Those requirements are pretty trivial for a vendor that specializes in scanning. To name just a few other vendors/products in addition to Kofax:

• EMC/Captiva's InputAccel product
• Datacap
• eCopy ShareScan
• Verity/Cardiff/Autonomy

Many document management solutions also have built-in scanning front ends but they're typically not as functional as the specialized capture products. Nearly all of these solutions have COM/ActiveX API support. I don't know of any open source solutions for scanning but I haven't ever really searched for any either.

Most of the scanning software vendors do use a "volume" or "capacity" license. Typically the volume renews at the end of the term (i.e. 1M pages a year - auto renewing each year without additional cost). Thus, you don't pay strictly "per page" in the sense that if you purchase a capacity of 1M images per year and you only end up scanning 500K pages you don't get a refund. It is possible, although much less common to have a one-time volume that doesn't automatically renew and when it runs out you would be required to purchase additional volume. Most vendors are moving away from dongles to control the volume and are moving to software licensing.

A side note about Kofax:

Kofax has historically been sold through a system of Value Added Resellers so the quality of various implementations can vary widely. In addition it is highly customizable and comes in a variety of flavors with lots of add-on modules so one customer's Kofax system can be significantly different from other systems.

Kofax is used in enterprise-grade systems for scanning and automatic capture of millions and millions of documents a year. It has a significant chunk of the document scanning market share. No, I'm not a Kofax fanboy, if I was I wouldn't have mentioned competitive products; however, I am very familiar with it. Like the other products on the market, it has strengths and weaknesses. I realize that Michael was just relaying what he had heard but I just couldn't let that sweeping generalization pass without comment. Saying a product that has a significant percentage of market share is "not useful or user friendly" for scanning is kind of like saying "Windows isn't a useful server operating system". It's just too broad of a generalization.

Cheers,

Brian

Answer 3

PSIGEN makes a great alternative to Kofax, is packed with features and reasonably priced.

Kofax Alternative Scanning and Capture Application