ICR success rate for hand written values

[Bruce_Peters1]

We are just starting on a project that will use Advanced Capture to scan 20 years of documents which contain hand written values on some standard form templates.  This will be many thousands of documents.  Has anyone else done something like this using Advanced Capture?  What was your success rate with ICR within the Advanced Capture module when reading these values?

[Dan_Hansen1]

Hi Bruce, I can throw out some general information here.

ICR recognition industry-wide hits various limitations due to every person's hand writing being different.  One very large factor as to whether you'll get any type of accuracy is the structure of the form itself.  You mentioned "standard form templates", so I assume you are referring to consistent forms with drop-out colors that constrain the data entry points.  If your forms are properly structured in this manner, you can expect to see decent accuracy.

Keep in mind "decent" accuracy in the ICR world means maybe around 60-80%.

That's about the best I can reply without seeing the forms and/or running through some testing.  That said, Hyland's module does provide a fair amount of options that can be tweaked to fine tune the accuracy, again depending on the form.

I'd suggest running your specific forms through a test environment to fine tune the configuration and to confirm your accuracy rate.  You didn't mention the number of documents that you have, but be sure to use a fair sampling when you test it.  This is the only way you'll get a solid answer to your accuracy rate.

Hope that helps - take care.

[Gary_Leaf]

Hi Bruce.  We did some preliminary testing with resident files of preprinted forms that were filled in by hand.  They were never designed for ICR, were is excellent shape as they have been housed in hanging file folders in heated and airconditioned file rooms, and were totally useless from an ICR perspective.  English is often a second language for our clientelle so for even a human to decipher the content sometimes proves challanging.  As a result, we spent 6 months completly redesigning and modifying over 600 forms to introduce a "Office Use Only" box htat will go out with the three key pieces of information necessary to automatically index future forms using Advanced Capture.  Our testing shows success rate percentages s for these new forms in the high 90's.  If you have not investigated, you could always trial AC and play with a few sample forms.  Maybe you'lll get lucky...we didn't.  Good luck!